Remember that famous GOP crackup that people keep predicting? I always thought that easy immigration would bring things to a head between social cons who loathe it and the chamber of commerce, who need it. Instead it turns out that the party will split at the seams between bugf*ck nutters in the rightroots, the House and a small but growing Senate colony and the shrinking number who still have a working phone line to the real world.
All that the crackpot crack-up needed was was a lose-lose scenario like the sequester ‘cliff’ where no sane person could say no to a compromise. McConnell and Boehner both know that their options only get worse if their caucus cannot even look like it is talking with the president in good faith. On the other hand, some X number of Boehner’s people just don’t give a damn. These guys have an idea of ceaseless struggle and ideological purity that would fit right in with any fill-in-the-blank that comes to mind when you think of government by crazy people. To them, and by ‘them’ I mean as much as anything the unaccountable rightwing media who tell the House loons and their constituents what to think, Boehner and McConnell are capitalist-roader counterrevolutionaries if they don’t stick close enough to the dictates of the nutroots. Party unity my ass and all that.
Take, for instance, Darrell Issa. Please.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), who is joining a growing number of Republicans trying to add more spending cuts to the last-minute fiscal cliff deal and send it back to the Senate, joked that Senators may have been drunk when they passed the measure in the early hours of Jan 1.
The drunk part was a joke of course. What stood out for me was when Issa put a finer point on it.
I was having a little fun with you, Wolf. The fact is, it was after midnight. It was a piece of legislation intended to be passable, not necessarily to be right.
All things considered, that ‘art of the possible’ thing had a pretty good run.
Ted_75
I’ve said it before I’ll say it again–JUST SAY NO DEAL.
No deal. None. Nada. No negotiations with Obambi on either this or the debt ceiling. Unless he gives us the Ryan Budget, that is.
Baud
I was expecting quite a different story about Boehner when I read the title.
Southern Beale
When you’ve lost Jennifer Rubin …. :
Ouch ….
gogol's wife
Oh, God, somebody mentioned him earlier today and here he is. God help us.
andy
This reminds me of the scene in Deliverance. They do love showing everybody who’s in charge, don’t they?
The prophet Nostradumbass
@gogol’s wife: Taco?
Ted_75
2014? We control a majority of state legislatures since the Democrat base doesn’t vote in off-year elections, which means WE CONTROL who gets elected to the House and who doesn’t.
Gerrymandering, baby. Learn to love it.
Maude
Issa made a bad mistake. He shouldn’t have insulted the Senate.
He just made Republican enemies.
He should go back to stealing cars.
gogol's wife
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Don’t you recognize him?
Mike S
Steve La Tourette, Republican from Ohio said he shouldn’t have to vote for something writen by “sleep deprived octogenarians.”
aimai
I read somewhere that someone said something contemptuous about “octogenarians going without sleep” in the Senate as another reason to be dismissive of the Senate compromise.
But what PISSED ME THE FUCK OFF was listening to NPR’s idiot correspondent from Capitol Hill puzzling over whether Biden being asked to step in was a loss of face for Obama that (needed to be blamed on) Obama. They didn’t even reach the question of the utter, stunning, insulting, disrespect offered Obama by Boehner and McConnell or why that was so obvious and acceptable that it would go without saying.
aimai
piratedan
ahhh yes, a Government by the minority for the minority, just the way that Calhoun and Davis would have wanted.
While this hurts millions of people across the nation, just how long will the media play as a compliant dunce to this shit and not tell the truth? Do the pundits have to be roasted over an open pit before anyone in the media gets a spine and finally calls out these ideological terrorists… makes me think that Bin Laden won after all by watching these folks who are completely certifiable in their fear and loathing of anything that isn’t exactly like themselves.
Ted_75
So how’s Hopey Changey working out for you all now?
The Dangerman
It may have been that last beer, but it kinda smells like it’s gonna pass; a disaster for the Right, but killing it is a bigger disaster. Kinda surprising; sanity will prevail.
Of course, the Nutty Right will lose their shit and how that plays out is anyone’s guess…
aimai
MIke S beat me to it.
dr. bloor
@Southern Beale:
As if she bears no responsibility for cheerleading them every step of the way into that corner in the first place. Fuck her.
Strike that. Wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
Mnemosyne
@Ted_75:
Considering that we have Republican columnists talking about how the Republicans have made themselves look like clowns in front of the whole world for rejecting this deal, I’d say he’s working out great.
Did you get your red nose and rainbow wig in the mail yet, or is it not coming until tomorrow?
Ted_75
@Mnemosyne:
Nobody in the conservative movement cares about the beltway elitists. They can go jump off a cliff.
A new day is coming…
The prophet Nostradumbass
@gogol’s wife: well, yes, that’s why I used the name.
Mike S
@Ted_75:
You dumbasses were saying that before the election too. Hell, the FOX News allstars were telling idiots like you that Romney would win it in a landslide.
pseudonymous in nc
…with UNLIMITED CORPORATE CASH?
New year, new name, same troll.
andy
@Mike S: Pretty big werds for a Republican. Showoff!!!
Maude
@aimai:
The NPR reporter needs to learn about the VP and the Senate. What an ignorant idiot. He gets paid for this. Shame on NPR.
I stopped listening in 2008.
J. Michael Neal
Yo, Bucky! Wake your offense the fuck up!
Peter
I love how you can always tell just how badly the Republicans are getting squeezed by how vocal PO gets right before it happens.
Ted_75
@pseudonymous in nc:
It may not has been quite effective as hope in the Presidential and Senate races, but in state-level races it essentially means the Super PACs can place in anyone they choose, which means gerrymandering in our favor, which means a permanent House GOP Majority…
gene108
@Ted_75: that is why Reps lost the House and Senate in 2006.
Comrade Jake
I kind of miss the troll who kept telling us that Glenn Beck was soon to take over the world.
CaseyL
OK, I admit, I’ve been lurking more than commenting lately; but do we have some new trolls around here? Or are they old ones with new handles?
Seems I’ve had to skim past an awful lot of comments the last couple days.
magurakurin
@The Dangerman:
Rep. Tom Cole seems to agree with you
Mnemosyne
@Ted_75:
Those “beltway elitists” are the ones who steered UNLIMITED CORPORATE CASH to your candidates. Piss them off, and your beloved teabaggers won’t have a dime to spend in 2014.
What, you thought Karl Rove would keep supporting your little revolution after it started losing him money?
Baud
@CaseyL:
I think mostly old trolls with new handles.
Mnemosyne
@CaseyL:
Mostly old ones with new handles.
Peter
@CaseyL: This particular troll is an old favorite, back under a new name. He hadn’t been seen since Romney got his shit kicked in.
Rosie Outlook
@Mnemosyne: Please don’t feed the trolls anything but salted dicks.
Bruce S
Give Issa some credit – he’s come a long way since his days as a car thief.
Mnemosyne
@Rosie Outlook:
Fine, take away my fun. I should probably shower at some point today anyway since tomorrow I have to go back to work (boo!)
jwb
@Peter: And PO is almost as reliable as Bill Kristol in his powers of prognostication.
magurakurin
@Mnemosyne:
Ya gotta admit, it is possible could be just one busy beaver. He has argued with himself and his sock puppets before.
cmorenc
Speaking of trolls, what ever happened to Brick Oven Bill? Ted_75 doesn’t sound much like Bill-with-a-renamed-handle. Bill could often be irritating and sometimes disgusting, but he was usually enough off-the-wall eccentric to sometimes be sort of fun too as trolls go. Not that I’m pining for his return.
Culture of Truth
I used to have mass e-mail chain called The Coming Republican Crack Up
Peregrinus
@cmorenc:
IIRC, he got banned, no?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Um… okay? how so? These people are amazing. Was it Andrea something? Seabrook? Who once famously puzzled over John Murtha criticizing Bush’s handling of Iraq, because he usually supports the troops? Or the Fox News mole who called Cash for Clunkers “Obama’s Katrina”?
Bruce S
Looks like it’s going for a vote. My ONLY problem with this deal – in context of the short-term possible – is that it leaves the debt ceiling vote hanging and sequestration kicked down the road. I’m not sure that it was a good idea to negotiate an interim deal that didn’t take that battle into account. The next Congress will be slightly less crazy than this one. That seems like an important consideration that hinged on only a few more days – but other than government shutdown, there’s no leverage left with the GOP when the debt ceiling hits. And they’re going to be out for blood, considering that the “base” is going to consider this deal with Obama a major loss.
mir13
Then do something, GOP spokesnozzle. Get something done. Dazzle us with your extensive list of accomplishments that your 30 Governors and State Legislatures have compiled since ’09. Jobs, jobs, jobs you said, and the Congressional Republicans have been laser-focused ever since. And it shows. Listen, I’ve not been able to find any of the GOP’s accomplishments in the liberal media. Perhaps there is a GOP spokesnozzle that could list them for us dirty lib’s here at BJ.
(Heh, he said BJ. Heh.)
Cacti
Per Politico, House will allow a vote on the Senate Bill.
Game, set, and match.
Raven
@Mike S: That’s the same fucking idiot, I forget his name, he’s a sissy motherfucker who got all up in our faces about how the mormon was going to do this and that. So gutless he can’t even use the same handle. Fucking punk.
Raven
@Peregrinus: This jackass was here before the election.
Bruce S
@Ted_75:
“A new day is coming”
Yeah – but it will take a demographic shift based on more old white men dying off and more brown people getting citizenship – both of which are inevitable and happening as we speak – before we finally see that sunlight. Meanwhile, dumbass trolls…The Horror!
As for that “new day”- Adios, asshole!
weaselone
Read comments to an article on an American Thinker linked to by a Facebook friend. A 250K vs. 400K cutoff for tax increases seems rather trivial when you have a bunch of people actually convinced this country is slipping ever closer to full blown Soviet style socialism and who seem poised to go full metal wingnut on us commie socialists, i.e. progressives.
Publius39
@Raven: I believe the troll’s name was political observer.
Raven
@Publius39: Ding! We have a winner.
Peregrinus
@Raven:
I meant Brick Oven Bill . . . unless I fucked up and @’d the wrong person? Doesn’t look like I did.
CaseyL
Yes, the House will vote on the Senate – but not until 9:00. Not sure if that’s to give everyone time to get into the chamber for the vote, or if they’re still counting votes and twisting arms.
Per TPM, Boehner told his caucus that amendments would kill the bill in the Senate, and that the GOP House would get all the blame. If that’s true, he must have put it in stark terms, because up to that point, the teahadists didn’t care about consequences. Maybe he heard from the GOP’s corporate sponsors? (The non-PAC, non-Rove ones.)
PS: Thanks for identifying the new troll/same as the old troll.
Forum Transmitted Disease
The House writes all fiscal legislation, by law and custom.
As some imbecile above notes, the House is in GOP hands and will be there for quite some time.
Good.
The federal government spends the overwhelming majority of its money on three areas of the budget, and only by cutting any of these three can any progress be made on deficit reduction at all:
Medicare
Social Security
Defense
So let the GOP name which of these is to be cut, and by how much. Let them present their budget to the American people. You will note that they have not done so.
We’ll get the House back in short order after they do, as the Republican base that depends on at least two out of three of these government programs panics, and flee the party in droves.
Mnemosyne
@Bruce S:
Honestly, I’m not sure Democrats would be in a better negotiating position if this doesn’t pass, because the teahadis would consider that a major victory over the Kenyan Usurper and decide they need to stick to their guns even more.
I kind of suspect that what’s happening behind the scenes is that the big money boys have been screaming into their cell phones for the past week about the damage all of this is doing to their investments, which is why the result in the Senate was so lopsided.
Either way, I think the only rational course for the Democrats is to try and control the bleeding until 2014, and if they can get the Republicans to fight each other in the meantime, so much the better.
Bruce S
@efgoldman:
You’re right – but what will that mean for the next round? Would Obama have been better off going for a “bigger deal” that included at least the debt ceiling in this go round, when he had the Bush tax cuts in his pocket? That’s the question I’m asking, I guess mostly myself. I’d like to see some substantive analysis centered on that. I’m not angry about this deal in itself – which wasn’t bad in context – but I’m worried about the implications for the next fight. And, no, I’m not smarter than Obama. But I don’t assume that the Oval Office is the source of all wisdom…when in fact it’s more than a bit of a bubble, with a lot of contending forces steeped in Beltway Vision within. This is just a fact, in any administration.
Baud
@Bruce S:
I’ve never understood this argument. Was Obama supposed to trade lower tax rates on the rich for an extension of the debt ceiling?
Maude
@Peregrinus:
Brick oven made very racist remarks here. He is elsewhere.
Bruce S
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah – the hair we’re splitting and speculating over is essentially all on the heads of crazy GOPers in Congress. That’s the problem and no amount of smarts or hard-ass negotiating is going to change that ugly fact. After this mess is marginally cleaned up we need to move on and focus on the congressional elections of 2014. We probably can’t retake the House in it’s entirety, but we need to do some more damage to the GOP and make Boehner’s box even smaller than it already is. Maybe some more of the “purple” people will wake the fuck up and see what these fuckers are doing to our country. And that Obama is their best hope if they are truly “moderate” – a totally reasonable man, not some flaming lefty.
Peregrinus
@Maude:
I thought as much. I missed the actual remarks but I think I was here for the immediate aftermath.
CaseyL
There will be a different Congress in 2 months. Fewer teabaggers, more Democrats in the Houses, more-and-better Democrats in the Senate.
Debt ceiling negotiations might be a lot different than last year.
Plus, Boehner will have already broken the Hastert Rule once. If he’s still Speaker, he may be less hesitant to do it again.
Bruce S
@Baud:
I don’t totally understand the argument either, because it’s speculation about negotiating positions. But what I see in the argument is that going over the cliff would create a greater sense of urgency and crisis, that would force the GOP’s hand. It’s speculation. But either way it’s speculation – to assert that forcing a deal without including the debt ceiling and making the “crisis” moment even a bit bigger, WHILE you still have the Bush tax cuts in your pocket, was a better strategy – and leaving that major fight for another day when all you have, presumably, is government shutdown. And government shutdown holds the same nasty consequences for lots of folks, if it goes on for more than a week or so, that going off the “cliff” would have held.
I don’t have an answer to you question, but I don’t see any answer to mine either. This thing was going to play out pretty ugly either way – but the Bush tax cuts were the only leverage I see. And it wasn’t about giving the GOP something they wanted – it was about humiliating them in the eyes of the public. Problem with that, of course, is that gerrymandering has created a cohort of congressional Republicans who don’t give a shit about anything. That’s the problem that’s inherent – no matter what one sees as the best negotiating position or the optimal possible package.
Emma
@Bruce S: Bruce, there’s no way to analyze it because the house GOP is not rational. When one conducts that sort of analysis one assumes the behavior of both parties is to maximize their own success, meaning how well they can produce for their constituencies. The House Republicans don’t give a flying fig about their constituency. It’s all about getting Obama.
Todd
@Ted_75:
Pretty well, considering our plans for baseball bats being planted across movement conservative skulls.
How does Charles Krautface plan on surviving the great conservatard uprising?
Liberty60
I’m cautious about invoking the eleventy dimensional chess thing, but at this moment, 6:16 PST, it appears that the deal is going to fracture the Republican caucus in the House, destroying the Speaker, and alienating the rightwing blogosphere, cleaving it from the Wall Street puppetmasters.
And in the absense of a deal, leaving huge tax revenue increases to fund the government.
Not to overlook the pain of UEI running out, but in longer terms, this seems like a pretty good position to be in, all things considered.
Ted & Hellen
Just a note: This is the same front page post that has been put up here approximately 354 times in the last month.
Bruce S
@Emma:
Yeah.
HEY YOU
The 151 RepConTeas in the “House of Republic Party” that voted against the bill were actually voting for a tax increase for All Americans.
The RCT’s that voted for the bill wanted to continue taxes on the Job Creators. The CBO said the bill would add $4 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. This almost sounds like the RCTs want to tax & spend.
I should not have this much fun.