At the zoo
by digby
It’s quite a day so far. The Republicans are pretty much going to pass a bill that’s even more horrifying than before. It seems they are particularly outraged by Pell Grants at the moment, which Gaius Publius pointed out to me on twitter is not because they fear educated people, but because they think only black people get them. Of course.
The House GOP is now advancing a plan that Paul Ryan admitted yesterday is “unrealistic.”
Meanwhile, the President came out again and told people to tweet their congressmen. because it was such a successful ploy the last time. If I had to guess, the Tea Partying wrecking crew tend to only hear the constituents who are reinforcing the moronic view that failing to raise the debt ceiling will magically erase the debt and make all the icky undeserving icky people disappear so America will be pure again.
David Frum wrote that Ann Coulter may be shrill but she isn’t a fool for saying that Republicans are going to be left holding the bag if all this blows up. (No word on whether or not she’ll ever be held responsible for her starring role in the creation of the psychopathic modern right wing.) Hopefully she’s right, but somehow I have my doubts. As Krugman points out in his column this morning:
…News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.
Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?
The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.
Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. As you may know, President Obama initially tried to strike a “Grand Bargain” with Republicans over taxes and spending. To do so, he not only chose not to make an issue of G.O.P. extortion, he offered extraordinary concessions on Democratic priorities: an increase in the age of Medicare eligibility, sharp spending cuts and only small revenue increases. As The Times’s Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter’s preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter’s preferences.
But Republicans rejected the deal. So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? “Obama, Republicans Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric.”
It’s pretty to think that at the end of this the country will see the GOP for the extremists they are, but I have no reason to believe that’s how it’s been portrayed. In my own, admittedly small, survey of ordinary people, they blame whoever they didn’t vote for and “government” in general. Here in California we’ve been dealing with a dysfunctional capitol for so long it’s just standard operating procedure.
The best thing that’s happening in Washington right now is at the zoo (and I don’t mean the capitol.)
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