Year: 2013

I don't use "Tea Party" any more because the fact is the Republican Party is staffed and run by members of what was once called the Tea Party. I also don't use "treason" very much. Perhaps because during the run up to the Iraq war it was overused, and made meaningless, by those who argued that opposition to President Bush's lamebrain adventure in Iraq was treasonous. Nevertheless, whether you use John Carney's 'Tea Party' to give your Republican friends an "out" or you use "Republican" to describe the vandals in the House of Representative, one thing is clear. Modern Republicans have changed the country for the worse. As Bloomberg points out:

These tactics have long-term costs. If the U.S. defaults on its debt because a handful of Republican legislators don’t like a law vetted by all branches of government, the damage will go beyond a much lower credit rating. Something else -- a sense that the U.S. is, for all its differences, united -- will have been lost.

So now this is happening. Republicans have begun to organize around the premise that a default would not be catastrophic. Have they taken a page out of tricky Dick's playbook?

The recent PPP polling has been getting a lot of attention. In addition to basic "approve/disapprove" they asked about Tea Party sentiment in the district. The high levels of disgust with the tea party provides Democrats with real openings in these districts.

According to Politico, it's because Harry Reid wants him there. Doesn't want him giving any more stuff away to the Rethugs:

“None of the deals Biden has struck have aged well from the perspective of the Democratic Caucus,” said one Senate Democratic official aware of Reid’s face-to-face insistence that Biden be excluded. "In December, McConnell went around Reid — and straight to Biden — to get a better arrangement for Republicans.

A Republican congressman gives his a history lesson:

The congressman began with an anecdote from the Civil War. "I would liken this a little bit to Gettysburg, where a Confederate unit went looking for shoes and stumbled into Union cavalry, and all of a sudden found itself embroiled in battle on a battlefield it didn't intend to be on, and everybody just kept feeding troops into it," the congressman said. "That's basically what's happening now in a political sense. This isn't exactly the fight I think Republicans wanted to have, certainly that the leadership wanted to have, but it's the fight that's here."

So the GOP is the Confederacy, about to be slaughtered in battle.

Where are Delaware's Republican grownups? Doesn't Delaware even have a functioning GOP anymore? Take a look at Charlie Copeland's official DEGOP Chair blog page. Ridiculous. Copeland is particularly craven given the politics of his father, a Republican who was instrumental in bringing Planned Parenthood to Delaware. What ever happened to the sane/insane divide in the party. I haven't heard a peep about the GOP's outrageous and unpatriotic brinksmanship from ANY Delaware Republican. Kovach? Lopez? Are you guys the future leaders of a political party or what? Man up for God's sake. While the "moderates" cower in silence, many Delaware Republicans live in the same self-imposed intellectual isolation that Ted Cruz inhabits. It is an intellectual ghetto in which the only voices are extremist charlatans who say there’s no risk associated with default. Because they never hear the thoughts of alleged Republican moderates like Copeland or Kovach, they honestly think that the government can structure payments so that the country’s creditors are held harmless. An alarming number of Republicans think this way, and that is to the DEGOP's eternal shame. The Delaware Republican Party "moderates" no doubt strut their level-headed reasonableness behind closed doors, but there are publicly complicit in allowing the GOP's dangerous fantasies to flourish. < / rant >

Once again I keep hearing that for Boehner to get himself out of this mess of his own creation, he will need some kind of face saving concession that he can take to his mouth breathers. However, if today is any indication, there will be no face saver for Boehner. Today was spent easily boxing Boehner into yet another corner of his own making, after the Speaker's unwise comments on Sunday that he did not have the votes for either a clean CR or a clean debt ceiling vote. The response from all united Democrats everywhere was obvious to all: Prove it. Hold the vote. Do it now. That was the mantra today. But Boehner, being the weakest and most strategically dumb Speaker in the history of the United States, can't do that, for, as everyone knows, both bills would pass. The only way out of this now for Boehner is for him to, pardon the expression, Ladies, man up. Take his medicine. Face the consequences. Allow votes on both clean bills, allowing both to pass. Yes, he will in all likelihood lose his job of Speaker as a result, but that is not our fault. It is his. If he does not do it, yes, he may remain Speaker, for a while. But being solely responsible for a continued government shutdown and then a debt default that plunges the nation in the Great Depression II, his name will go down in history as more infamous and loathsome than Herbert Hoover. And then the GOP will lose the House.