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Sunday, May 15, 2011

Republicans Take Themselves Hostage, Threaten to Shoot Hostage

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) declared on "Face the Nation" today that he's "ready to cut the deal today" on raising the U.S. debt ceiling, so long as the President accepts a package of fiscally irresponsible spending cuts many of them reflecting the extreme right-wing ideological priorities of his base.

As Steve Benen comments: "Boehner’s not talking about striking some kind of compromise; he’s talking about being paid a ransom. In this case, the 'deal' is 'Boehner gets what he wants.' I don’t mean to sound picky, but that doesn’t match any reasonable definition of a 'deal.'"

This is true of course as far as it goes, but what is really so extraordinary about this situation is that Boehner is exactly equally concerned about the consequences that will result from the failure of the deal as the people are with whom he is presumably negotiating this hostage crisis. Boehner is like a parent taking his own child hostage, threatening his own partner (with whom he still lives and expects to continue to live as if there were nothing the least bit odd about all this business) with the killing of his child, and hoping his partner will give him whatever he is demanding all the while cherishing the child he threatens quite as much as his partner does.

Republicans have been whining about the dangers of economic uncertainty to justify their refusal to regulate enterprise that has demonstrated repeatedly that it cannot be expected to behave remotely responsibly in the absence of regulation, and now threaten to plunge the US economy and no small part of the world economy into profound uncertainty and crisis, as we default on our debts and lose the sense of who can be counted to pay how much, when across the board.

Of course, this is nothing new, as Republicans have spent the whole year fulminating about deficits while proposing to balloon deficits because they refuse to raise revenues even when spending cuts are palpably unequal to the deficits they claim to abhor all the while ensuring their increase. No, everybody knows the talk of uncertainty is a deception to enable the real devotion to the deregulatory dismantlement of government as such, everybody knows the talk of deficits is a deception to enable the real devotion to the defunding and dismantlement of government as such, everybody knows that Republicans hate government, they hate the very idea of good government, they hate the work government does to provide any measure of security or stability or equity that might constrain incumbent-elite accumulation of control and wealth.

But of course the threat not to raise the debt ceiling is a threat to dismantle facets of governance without which these very incumbent elite interests cannot maintain some of the control and profit-taking to which they have grown accustomed. Movement republicanism has indulged its nonsensical deceptions for so long that the agents implementing the con have come to believe it themselves or are so stupid or enraptured that they could scarcely understand the real stakes of the game they are playing if you laid it out for them in monosyllables and cartoons.

No, Republicans haven't taken their own child hostage, they are actually holding the gun to their own heads and are demanding we restrain them from pulling the trigger for fear of drowning us in the gore of the resulting explosion, and losing track in their imbecilic triumph at the scheme that they would be killing themselves were they to make good on the threat.

There is no negotiating with people who behave this way. The only way to win this game is to refuse to play and hope Republicans will come to their senses or be cajoled into compliance with sense by their corporate masters.

America voted or allowed these lunatics to run the asylum, elections have consequences, it's not like this is any kind of surprise.

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