Tantrums

 Being an adult in many ways is accepting that you won't get everything you want all the time. At best, life is a two-steps-forward, one-step-back sort of endeavor.

The House GOP are children. The compromise bill to keep the government functioning has enraged all the usual howler monkeys in the Chaos Caucus and Marjorie Traitor Greene is looking to bring down Mike Johnson (R-Gilead) without, of course, a plan for what comes next. 

Keeping the government open would seem like the most basic function of members of Congress. Like the literal least they can do. With a Democratic Senate and White House, that will require some necessary tradeoffs and a GROWN UP WOULD UNDERSTAND THIS. As Scott Lemieux notes, the lunatics in the GOP have made Ken Buck look like the voice of reason. That's... something.

The other element to all this is the irresponsible rhetoric coming from irresponsible people. The Congress has passed a compromise bill to keep the government open and provide for some important policy goals to be fulfilled, like additional border patrol agents that Republicans say they want. Yes, sadly for them it means that fewer children will be in poverty, but beating up on immigrants means you have to feed some kids, sorry.

The rhetoric that oozes from the fever swamp is that of apocalyptic collapse. About everything all the time. Now, yes, Democrats point to a potential Trump restoration as a potentially lethal threat to democratic governance in America. That is true, but then again...that is true. Dems say this, but only because that's exactly what Trump is promising he will do if re-elected. Meanwhile, the GOP thinks that earned income tax credits are the end of the republic. There's $300,000,000 for Ukraine - completely inadequate, but still something - that the howler monkeys will attack as being the end of America or something.

Some of this is simply the way that politics functions in an age of high negative partisanship. You see the other side as intrinsically alien. Social media makes it worse by amplifying the worst voices in any debate. Trump is our first social media president, and he's "good" at shouty ALL CAPS frothing madness that drives so much "engagement". Hell, I'm guilty of it, too, by responding rather than blocking the lunatics on Twitter. 

Why do people who are otherwise decent people support Trump? The man has been convicted of fraud three separate times; he has been found liable for sexual assault; he attempted to overturn the election; he has committed serial financial crimes. 

However, if you believe that $1billion for more Head Start programs and military day care centers are the "end of America" then this sputtering demagogue who threatens to wreck havoc on Washington DC seems less like the "Worst American Ever" and more like the champion of your bizarro cause.