Speaking with ThinkProgress today, Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) offered a take on the reasons behind House Republicans’ obstinacy on the debt ceiling. Describing it as the “the party of denial,” Moran compared the current GOP to the historical, nativist “Know-Nothing party” that, incidentally, wanted to restrict types of immigrants and have daily bible readings in public schools. Moran said Republicans “don’t know enough to know what they don’t know,” including “how serious lifting the debt ceiling it,” or “the results of any of their own actions.” “They just don’t know, they don’t care,” Moran said, adding that “a majority of the House Republicans ran on the basis that government doesn’t work. And now that they’re elected they’re determined to prove it.”
There’s a difference between stupidity and willfully ignorance. In the case of today’s GOP, I have to believe that there are some fairly intelligent people in Congress who happen to have an “R” behind their names. That these people live in fear of a small band of ignorant zealots is something that should be cause for no small amount of shame. Why people so ostensibly intelligent choose to be so willfully ignorant and cowardly is something that simply defies rational understanding. It’s not as if Conservatism can or should be equated with rampant, unchecked ignorance; far from it. Classical Conservatism is in many ways a laudable and very serviceable ideology. Unfortunately, today’s GOP has been so poisoned by Tea Party orthodoxy and anti-intellectualism that rational thought and a grip on reality seem to be optional equipment. Science and demonstrable reality are useful only insofar as they support a rabid Far-Right agenda seemingly more focused on watching America burn than on pulling it out of the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
How DO you talk to with people so thoroughly and completely divorced from reality and so unable to display anything resembling rationality? How do you reason with people so impervious to reason? Here in the fact- and evidence-based world, we at least try to deal with the empirical, the provable, and the demonstrably real. Teapublicans, for that’s really what today’s GOP has become, are so wedded to their ideology at the expense of truth, fact, and reason that what they believe trumps anything and everything. These are people perfectly willing to watch America burn if it means that they won’t have to compromise their tightly-held, fact-free, preconceived notions.
If we don’t get to have our version of America, then you don’t get to have ANY version of America….
It’s been said that the sound of Fundamentalism is the sound of a mind slamming shut. This description might as well have been invented for Teapublicans.
It used to be that politics was the “art of the possible” (hat tip to the late Tip O’Neill). Now, politics in the new Tea Party world order is all about holding America hostage. It’s about leverage and brinksmanship and the willingness to take America to (and perhaps over) the very edge of disaster…simply to get what they want. It doesn’t matter that they’re in the minority. If you know how to game the system, and if you’re willing to hold America and its political system hostage for however long it takes to get what you want, then that’s what you do- because compromise is for losers, moderate Republicans, and Liberals. When you believe that your political philosophy has been ordained by your flavor of God…well, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, is it?
Slash-and-burn Republicans in the House have already managed to shut down the Federal Aviation Administration. In a few days, their continued intransigence may result in America defaulting on its obligations. That the result of failing to raise the debt ceiling may be epic worldwide economic catastrophe seems lost on Teapublican zealots, who refuse to believe those who actually know and rightly fear what the consequences of inaction would be. They don’t believe because it doesn’t fit their agenda, and so they refuse to accept and acknowledge what most knowledgable and well-informed people form both parties readily admit to be true.
I joke a lot about this country turning into the set from Idiocracy…but this is no joke. This is about America and our future being held hostage by a small number of zealots whose slash-and-burn philosophy allows them to take an entire country down with them unless they get their way. Sadly, we have a President who’s demonstrated himself both unwilling and unable to stand up to them and call their bluff. Paul Krugman has called Barack Obama the “Conceder-in-Chief”; based on his track record to date, it would be hard to argue the point. And so America descends ever farther into a miasma of extremism, ignorance, and intolerance.
Idiocracy, indeed. That might just be an upgrade….
