Ah, the "insanity." The stupidity. It just keeps rolling along. The mighty US government held hostage by science deniers, selfish right-wing lying politicians and their ultra wealthy backers. Don't know about you but I couldn't sleep last night. In my several decades of following what's going on in my country I have never seen things degenerate to this point where one part of one party is holding hostage a very positive, needed, cost-saving program, legally established through an abnormally lengthy government process allowing for huge input from them, and even upheld by the Supreme Court. Which program is already stopping the steep decline on health care costs in our country.
And yet there are millions of Republican Tea Partiers who are delighted, as you can hear on C-Span comments, who want their leaders to make the Democrats suffer even if at great cost (billions) to us all. They'd be more delighted to see government unfunded and out of commission for months I believe. And the entire Republican Party is to be held to account for them because they have not stopped them but encouraged them!
People ask: "How can the Republicans do this when they know the president is not going to delay healthcare a year..... Why, it doesn't make any sense."
Answer is: It's the Republicans, stupid! The Party of Stupid. Many of them do not believe in evolution! Or climate change! Or that the earth is more than 6000 years old. Or peace through diplomacy! Etc. So it's not hard convincing them there are Obama "death panels" out there waiting to kill people. When it comes to convincing them of something, facts, truth, science do not matter. If they like the person, if they identify with the person speaking, they believe him/her. Blindly. Stupid is easier then getting the facts, than studying the issues. These low-information followers will swallow any lie. All you have to do to see this is listen to comments by them on C-Span --if you have the stomach for it! I rarely do because it leads to utter despair.
Indeed, one of these profoundly infuriating (one among many) ideologues who has carved out for himself a position of power and wealth which he will do anything to maintain:
U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a senior member of the House Science Committee, recently said climate change is a plot by liberals to "create global government to control all our lives."*
It's
so easy for them to manipulate people with their lies. Some of the people, those prone to disagree with science and rationality.
It's been a long time since I wrote a diary. This situation is so calculated, phony, destructive, and selfish on the part of those who crave power that I had to state my feelings of disgust.
The world is watching us. They watch C-Span, I just found out yesterday. The world watching the Republican Tea Party's insane crap on C-Span? Wow. This is criminal. Really, it is no wonder the reputation and influence of the US is in decline. You look at the health care system in Canada and across Europe and see a sane system of universal care. You look at one of the two US political parties seeking to deny health care to 30 million Americans in a carefully worked out plan (which they originated and approved when it was "their" idea) and you see what looks to the world, to me, crazy people. I will never again wonder about the loonies in other countries. (Norway now is forming a new right-wing party, for instance.) All they have to do is watch C-Span and they will find a blueprint to political party craziness, a blueprint to destruction, to messing up government, a financial system and people's lives!
I sure hope the Republicans pay a very high price for this destructive, crazy behavior and all their LIES because they should all be thrown out of office at the first chance possible. Yet they've made that very unlikely by gerrymandering and their lies except by a huge and dramatic uproar and disruption of the economy caused by the Republican Party, an ultimate backlash even by their constituents in "safe" districts.
John Boehner gets on tv and talks about "fairness" this morning???!! There is nothing fair about what the Republicans, government-haters, science-deniers, idiots, are doing to the American people. Every lie he tells is capable of being utterly refuted as a lie, often by his own words.
Like the lie last night implicit in the eleventh hour "bargain" to Democrats in the Senate that Congress should conference to talk about the Budget! Whereas in truth the Democrats have been pleading with them in both Houses for more than six months to no avail (in the Senate, Sen. Patty Murray has tried 18 times for half a year). The Republicans have REFUSED to TALK about the BUDGET! Yet the lie they present all the time to the public, to the camera, is that the Democrats "have not passed a Budget," that they "have no Budget," "Where is the Budget?" they ask.
The Democrats have never brought down the government to make a point. But that is exactly what the Republicans are now doing.
If there were a hell there'd be a special place for these creeps who shut down the government for their own unwinnable and craven ideologies/idiocies.
NOTE: Sorry, but I can't use the words "crazy!" and "stupid!" enough when it comes to Republicans as I seem to need that to cope. This is a hard day. (And 3 hours sleep is not enough.)
*I read that yesterday but I'm not sure where.