Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Boehner and Cantor Grinding Out the Closing Moves in the Movement Republican Dance of Death

Speaker Boehner wanted Eric Cantor in on the Biden debt talks because Cantor has more credibility with the GOP's energetic Tea-tide, and of course Cantor withdrew this morning from the talks precisely because he wants to keep that credibility intact inasmuch as it is almost all he has going for him at this point (and Paul Ryan is moving in on him there like a bird of prey).

The debt talks simply cannot conclude without some recommendations on the revenue side, of course. The Republican suicide-fantasy of some kind of bipartisan voluntary dismantlement into a transcontinental Somalia is obviously a non-starter in actual reality, but anything apart from that full fulminating idiocy has come incredibly to be a non-starter in the political reality of the Tea-tainted GOP base. Cantor's abandonment of Boehner signals yet another ratcheting up of GOP bankruptcy as anything like an actually governing national party, rather than as some kind of weird subcultural fandom for people who read Ayn Rand and Left Behind novels for pleasure. (That three GOP quasi-contenders, Gingrich, Palin, and Trump, were palpably using the campaign trail not seriously to contend for the nomination at all but as part of their self-promotional media marketing and various grifter schemes is another symptom of the shift from a real governing party to a subcultural phenomenon.)

Boehner is House Speaker, which is a responsible position in an actual working government. Now that Majority Leader Cantor has left him high and dry, Boehner will take a probably fatal hit for the slightest actually necessary gestures in the direction of minimally responsible governing in the agreement arising out of the Biden talks, which will mean in turn that he will probably lose his Speakership to Cantor who in gaining it will then in turn be faced with the new reality of Republican anti-governmentality as well: in achieving position one realizes the position is a government position from which one either governs and is punished with losing the position, or fails to govern which means losing the position anyway soon enough.

Republicans have been insisting that all government is bad and all politicians corrupt for years now, and it has never been particularly clear to me how they square this insistence either with their own ruthless efforts to participate in totally bad government or their inclusion within the class of inevitably corrupt politicians. But we have arrived at the logical consummation of this patent nonsense, in which to govern as a Republican is to ensure the result of getting kicked out of government by the Republican base.

They have only themselves to blame. Too bad they destroyed the country and killed all those people along the way to this perfectly predictable end-game.

No comments: