Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

It Should No Longer Be Debatable

The Republicans will not bring home the bacon.

So, the GOP, a Republican who caucuses with the Democrats and Jon Tester killed Obama's Jobs Bill in the Senate.  It "failed" 51-48.  Because the Senate sucks.

Not that it matters because even if it had passed, it won't make it through the House and we all know this and this is getting old and blah blah blah.

Here's what I'm waiting for.  We have the documentary evidence that the GOP - as Mitch McConnell put it - sees its primary job as making sure that Obama is a one term President.  We have the voting records to prove that they are voting against things they have supported in the past.

It is patently obvious that the GOP is intentionally voting against anything that Obama proposes precisely because it might help the economy.

Sorry, this is not new, but I just want to sum up how we got to this point.

Some Democrats are starting to say out loud that this is what is happening.  But frankly I am waiting for two things.

First, I want ALL Democrats - even you Tester - to say, repeatedly, that the GOP is intentionally trying to sabotage the economy in order to hurt Obama and the Democrats.  That they are playing cynical political games with people's lives.  You don't have to go link arms with patchouli smelling drummers in the OWS movement, but if you can constantly stress that the GOP is not just protecting millionaires from higher taxes, but actively tanking the economy for political gain, you change the debate in Washington.

Second, I want ALL Democrats to point out that the GOP has a vested interest in making government fail.  If you believe government is evil and does nothing right, then you should not be allowed to run the government.  Not when people need roads fixed and bridges built and veterans cared for and the economy fixed and Wall Street watched and so on and so on.

At some point, it will penetrate.  The dynamics of political journalism reflexively favor the wealthy and the powerful.  But they are also monumentally stupid and can be shaped by mere repetition.

Of course, as we know, the Democrats are incapable of doing anything remotely similar to message discipline so...

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