Have you ever paid money to go to a sporting event and found yourself cheering wildly for both teams to lose?! And not just lose, but for both teams to destroy themselves on the field of "play" so that neither team can ever recover and both are permanently banned from the playing field for all eternity? That's the position I find myself in as the Tea Party and Country Club factions of the GOP fight a battle to control a heartless, soulless, corrupt, political party who's soul purpose is to return the United States to one of it's worst points in history, deep into the 19th century.
If you're a farmer, you should plant every acre you have in popcorn because there's going to be a run on the stuff over the next 12 months. If your a Halloween costume retailer, you might want to consider stocking up on clown costumes with 3 pointed hats.
The press calls what's happening in the GOP today, a civil war. I prefer to think of it as a Confederacy of Dunces in revolution against the heartless Oligarchs who funded their revolution. Let's look at some of the latest from the press corps below the fold.
But first let me give credit to John Kennedy Toole who wrote the Pulitzer price winning novel "A Confederacy of Dunces". His main character, the bumbling Ignatius J. Reilly has come to mind as I watch the GOP clown car fill to over capacity, although Ignatius had far smarter delusions.
From the NYT Fiscal Crisis Sounds the Charge in G.O.P.’s ‘Civil War’
“Let’s face it: it was not a good maneuver,” Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the senior Senate Republican and supporter of the deal that ended the showdown, said on Thursday in an interview from his Capitol Hill office. “And that’s when you’ve got to have the adults running the thing.”
Have you yet to hear any of the GOP "moderates" say that they disagree with the goals of eliminating Obamacare, or crushing entitlements, or eliminating regulations, that their Tea Party comrades were striving for? Nope! It's all about the Tea Party's tactics. And what was wrong with the tactics? They were too visible to the public! The Country clubbers know you have to be better with your lies so the public doesn't catch on to what you are trying to do. They simply need to learn to be more deceptive.
It also heralded a very public escalation of a far more consequential battle for control of the Republican Party, a confrontation between Tea Party conservatives and establishment Republicans that will play out in the coming Congressional and presidential primaries in 2014 and 2016 but has been simmering since President George W. Bush’s administration, if not before.
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Some optimistic Republicans note that both of those campaigns planted the seeds for the conservative movement’s greatest success: Reagan’s 1980 election and two terms as president.
“The business community thought the supply-siders were nuts, and the country club Republicans thought the social conservatives scary,” William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, said of those squabbles. “That all worked out O.K.”
This reminds me of a conversation I had with the VP of the Colorado Libertarian party who was running as a Republican for a house seat in 1992. He told me that they were meeting down in Texas with some people, and that these Libertarians were planning on taking over the GOP at a national level. At the time, I thought he was nuts.
The Tea Party forces also lack the sort of singular leadership of a figure like Reagan. And besides overturning the health law and generally seeking to reverse the expansion of the federal government, the hard-liners do not have a cohesive policy plan.
“You have to have a specific agenda,” said Jeff Bell, a policy director in the 1976 Reagan campaign, citing the supply-side tax cuts that were so in vogue with Republicans of that era. “That’s a missing element in today’s conservative revolt.”
A lot of people say that Ronald Reagan couldn't get the GOP's nomination with today's Tea Party. I have to disagree. I believe Ronald Reagan would have gladly embraced the Tea Party and it's goals. I believe he truly is the father of the Tea Party, but he was restricted by a Democratically controlled house, and that no politician at the time believed you could push the limits so hard and get away with it. The war on government that he started still damages the country 30 years later.
So sit back and enjoy your popcorn and your free ticket to the ongoing episodes of the reality clown show that is now the GOP. But if you really want to be cheering in the end, start now to prepare to drag everybody you know to the final episode that airs on election day 2014.