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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

The Progressive Case for a Do Nothing Congress

So, if we do manage to get the debt ceiling raised in a comparatively timely comparatively low muss low fuss manner (too late!) the very best thing to do next is to do nothing at all until Obama gets re-elected. That's right. Pray, children, nothing gets done.

Anything done when this Republican crazytown crowd has to sign off on that doing is doing damage worse than doing nothing. And Republicans prefer government do nothing anyway, so what's not to like?

Given how horrible that kind of paralysis looks (and actually is) given how horrible everything actually is, there must of course be lots of white-racist furriner-fearing woman-hating gay-bashing money-grubbing corporate-cocksucking war-mongering city-hating gun-lusting muscular baby jesus licking cultural theater to fill the emptiness and that will be hard to live through. But that is the price for the palpable insanity of the mid-term elections, so suck it America, this is what you voted for or failed to vote against in November (I told you so).

Anyway, doing nothing means the Bush tax cuts die, which is a good thing, and Dems can at any rate posture and handwave about Republican obstructionism on lowering tax cuts for everybody but the rich as a way to hurdle whatever hairball candidate the weak GOP field throws up for the killer clown show horse race of 2012. And get your barf bags ready in advance for that grotesque spectacle, kids.

Otherwise, I say we should just fund the government with continuing resolutions and forego any 2012 budget until after the election once Republicans actually grasp that Obama's Presidency is a really-and-for-true fact with which they really-and-for-true have to deal.

For a while there I was thinking it would be good for Obama to draw a moral and pragmatic contrast with Ryan's cruel stupidity, but apparently "independents" think that makes Obama a scary black man so morning in America vacuities are the order of the day instead. Good thing Obama loves Reagan so much.

Maybe Democratic Base organizing and agitating at the State level in response to neo-feudal Movement Republican zealotry will provide the energy to improve the congressional terrain for a marginally more sensible second term. It's all pretty awful and depressing to contemplate, all the unfathomably stupid fake drama and all the ignoring of reality and stuff, but that's where we are.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> [W]hatever hairball candidate the weak GOP field
> throws up for the killer clown show horse race of 2012. . .
> [,] get your barf bags ready in advance for that grotesque
> spectacle, kids.

Well, we got used to Arnold Shwarzenegger as the governator
of California, so -- Donald Trump as President of the U.S.?

As the Gaffer said, it's an ill wind as blows nobody any
good -- Ivana and Marla will get book deals out of it,
I suppose. ;->

Dale Carrico said...

Well, we got used to Arnold Shwarzenegger as the governator
of California


I didn't. And the verdict is in: precisely as you would expect, Schwarzenegger was an unmitigated disaster for California in every exactly predictable way that I exactly properly expected. Brown is presiding over a state shock doctrined to within an inch of its life, and a miniscule minority of Republicans still expend all their energy to obstruct every effort to address problems in a sane way, functioning as a straight up nihilist force. It is actually wrong to assume that America can weather infinitely many pointless blows to its legitimacy, credit, and ecology. There really are limits. There really are consequences. Americans just think they can always start over because they've stolen and wasted so much of the treasure of the planet with their might that they live in bubbles of utter unreality (futurology is of course a transcendentalization of this mainstream fantasy). I am not sure America could have pulled out of a McCain/Palin presidency, and I am not sure the mid-term recapture of the House by the GOP is something we can pull out from either. We are very much at the end of the road in my opinion. Obama seems to me to represent a last chance at American sanity, and in a way very redolent of too little too late. Soon intelligent people of good will have to shift from our struggle to make the US a sane sustainable secular social democracy to an acceptance that this outcome isn't possible enough to justify the harm we are doing to ourselves and the world and start struggling to bring this evil empire down. Some of anti-Obama who handwave their radicalism in my comments section may fancy they have already made this shift ahead of me, but this shift would not be a matter of posturing as more radical than thou on blogs in my opinion -- but of actual revolutionary agitation and organizing. I'm not there myself, as this blog attests to regularly, and I don't hold out much hope for the results should I be brought there, but a sober contemplation of circumstances and their stakes says we're too close for comfort to precisely such a juncture.