Sunday, October 6, 2013

The Reign of Morons

Charles Pierce:
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
I ran against our idiot state representative in 2006 because I couldn't stand that the Republican party was turning into an organization run by the dumbest part of the group.  I didn't really say a whole lot to get out the message, because I quickly learned that a lot of people I like and generally respect bought into the nonsense. 

I've worked really hard in conversations with people since then to explain that because of the Bush tax cuts (and various state tax cuts), very rich people are paying much less in taxes than they used to, and that folks with lots of unearned income pay much less overall in taxes than most folks with earned income.  What I've come to realize is that most folks are too busy in their daily lives to be able to keep up on the numerous ways people at the top of the heap buffalo them with simplistic talking points to convince them that Republicans are working in their interests.

Not only that, but the loss of good-paying factory jobs, and the increase of service jobs has left the difference between the incomes the lower middle class (say, people making enough income they don't qualify for the earned-income tax credit), the working poor (people with jobs who qualify for the earned-income tax credit) and the unemployed poor (people who's income comes solely from government support), which leaves the first two groups extremely resentful of the third group.  They will support politicians who tell them that the third group is the cause of most of the deficit, when a significant portion comes from the tax cuts and wars, along with Medicare.  But they aren't the only people voting for those guys.  A large number of business people who should be able to see through the bullshit also buy in.  Of those politicians who sell that bullshit, the worst of the worst are the true believers, the ones who have turned trickle-down economics and hatred of the poor into quasi-religious beliefs to be combined with their religious fundamentalism.  Those are the idiot caucus, and they are at fault in this mess. They need cut out of our government like the malignancy they are.  While folks like John Boehner tell the same tall tales as the idiot caucus, they are willing to listen to the semi-sane and realize they can't just burn down the government.  Unfortunately, in their lust for power, Boehner and his ilk have handed over the reins to the idiot caucus and the craziest part of the base.

2 comments:

  1. Now one could say this is an extremist question, but what chance do you think that this road to perdition could eventually lead to a civil war?

    History has shown that extremism often leads to war, whether united against outside forces (Nazi Germany), or against its own (just about every civil war in human history). The US does have a history of this, as the mid 19th century had plenty of such zealous attitudes, and we know where that road led.

    Obviously, such an event would be a disaster of massive proportions, and heaven knows I don't want to see it. But seeing as how America is in such a time where people being able to talk and put themselves in other's shoes is an increasing rarity, it makes one wonder how much longer before large groups of people stop (semi) co-existing and start shooting.

    Thoughts?

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  2. I guess I'm hopeful that it won't come to that. However, I do think that if the regular folks realize how much screwing they've been getting from the wealthy, things could get fairly uncomfortable for the rich as it comes to taxes and politics.

    The reason I think that we probably won't see some kind of civil war is that the current fault lines are between rural folks who generally aren't doing as well as the suburban folks, and the inner city folks who are even worse off than the rural folks. The rural folks think it is the fault of the inner city folks that they are struggling, and also have an innate fear of being victims of crime at the hands of the inner city folks. That will probably be enough to keep them from coming in and starting to shoot.

    Even if they were to do that at some time, the suburban folks, and the wealthier folks in the gentrified areas of the inner city are going to make sure that comes to a stop, because they are the obvious targets of reprisal, not the spread out hicks in the middle of nowhere.

    While this deal is a mess, I think it is going to burn itself out as the radicals marginalize themselves, and demographics do their work. The tea party is already a fairly small segment of the population, and tea partiers willing to fight an actual war are way too few to do anything. I would think that any such talk would scare away enough people to completely marginalize them, a la the Weather Underground.

    Hopefully I'm right on that.

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