Establishment Republicans are probably right to believe that a government shutdown would hurt the GOP. But Republican office-holders are probably right to believe that supporting a shutdown would help them with GOP primary voters:
Overall, 71 percent of those surveyed opposed a shutdown, while 23 percent favored a shutdown. Among Republicans, 53 percent opposed, versus 37 percent who favored.
[…]Among Republicans who called themselves conservative, those who said they are very conservative favored shutdown by 63 percent to 27 percent, while those who said they are somewhat conservative opposed shutdown by 62 percent to 31 percent. Overall, Republicans who call themselves conservative were evenly split on the issue, 46 percent to 46 percent.
Two things: (a) if a very conservative voting group shows up on election day — and that’s likely in a lot of Republican primaries, especially in places like TN, SC, and KY — they’ll favor a candidate who shut the government down and (b) the non-incumbent Republican candidates will likely be pro-shutdown teahadists, so a shutdown certainly won’t hurt many Republican incumbents on primary day.
EconWatcher
How much damage has to be done to the economy before the Big Business types decide they need to flip the House? I don’t ask that rhetorically; it seems that at some point it has to be a possiblity.
Sure, they’d like to have unregulated labor markets, gutted environmental restrictions, and other nice things the teabaggers favor. But the threat of government shutdown and debt default would seem to matter a lot more to their bottom line.
Whatever else you might say about them, these guys know who butters their bread. And overall, I don’t think they’re getting buttered by the House GOP.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
When yer told for 40 years how terrible the federal government is, of course you aren’t going to care if they shut it down. They’ll only understand why it’s needed after they suffer consequences. That’s the only way you ever get through to the retarded rump right. Fire, pain. Fire, pain.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That number 37% again. But it does show the teatards are even a whiny minority in the Republicans.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: Yup. Most of them are so dumb they believe their own rhetoric. More than a few Tea Bagger Congress Critters were calling for actual default in the last go-round because they think it would be a good thing.
NobodySpecial
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Well, of course! THEY don’t use food stamps, THEY don’t need cops cuz they got a gun, THEY don’t need roads to drive on because they got their pick’um’up truck. Rednecks like that you can always tell because they talk a lot of shit in a crowd and get real small when it’s 1v1 unless they have the drop on you.
Suffern ACE
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: yep. Gold standard. No more printing press phony money.
dollared
Sigh. No matter how you cut it, the crazy 27% is a majority of the 47% who voted for Romney. So they rule our world.
piratedan
gotta love that thinking… fuck the country dammit! I Have to be re-elected!
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.)
I think that it’s only in the last two or three years that the big wheels in the Republican Party have come to understand just how badly they fucked themselves throwing themselves into the southern strategy so wholeheartedly. Yeah, I know, McConnell would like to be majority leader someday, and they all want to see a Republican president sometime in the next ten years. And they know that this teabag shit will keep them from the presidency or a Senate majority (without some kind of unforseeable fluke or calamity) for who knows how long; But they also know that if they spurn their teabag voters now, they’ll lose their primaries. And as much as they long for a national majority, they want to hold their own seats more. I don’t know how long the party can devolve before something cracks.
BGinCHI
How much longer will the GOP tolerate primaries?
They are not in the Constitution and they don’t want voters fucking their shit up anyway.
Napoleon
Doug, now you have given me an earworm. For whatever reason that song was one of my favorites as a kid.
Alexandra
Shutdown? Impeach n0bama!
Isn’t that the new thing again?
Er, the new black… as it were?
shelly
Probably the same 27% in Louisiana who think Obama is responsible for the poor response to Katrina.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@shelly: and for LA Republicans over 65, that number climbs to 40+%. And I’d be willing to bet that over 90% of that 40-odd% vote in every single election, which is how we got here.
catclub
@EconWatcher: ” I don’t ask that rhetorically; it seems that at some point it has to be a possiblity. .”
Twelfth of never. GM should have come out in favor of national healthcare – it solves their retiree healthcare problem, which was a very large part of their bankruptcy.
It used to be that industries that depended on federal investment in science and technology lobbied for those programs, now they hitch their wagon the Chamber of Commerce and keep their mouths shut.
So far the key pieces of the business GOP are still getting worse in terms of kicking the GOP in the nuts for killing their businesses. Twelfth of never.
SRW1
If only the headline reference were true for the GOP.
max
the non-incumbent Republican candidates will likely be pro-shutdown teahadists, so a shutdown certainly won’t hurt many Republican incumbents on primary day.
But it will hurt the GOP, which is why the establishment types want to avoid it. They want to punt to a debt ceiling fight, which amounts to the same thing in my book. (They haven’t tried it, so they haven’t learned.)
In either event, we’re gonna have a shutdown, so the correct way to proceed is to plan for it.
max
[‘I say we cut off social security and medicare and everything else in the red states and see how they like it then.’]
catclub
@EconWatcher: Remember the sane billionaire?
“Almost all political conflict, especially in the US, boils down to a fight between the Sane Billionaires and the Insane Billionaires. It generally follows this template:
INSANE BILLIONAIRES: Let’s kill everyone and take their money!
SANE BILLIONAIRES: I like the way you think. I really do. But if we keep everyone alive, and working for us, we’ll make even more money, in the long term.
INSANE BILLIONAIRES: You communist!!!
”
He’s given up.
raven
Phoenix, AZ — Beginning November 1st of this year, the state of Arizona is implementing a mandatory school program designed for all children grades K-12 to help homosexual males and women become straight. The controversial conversion therapy will be used in all of Arizona’s 2,325 public school curriculums and is already gathering a large amount of criticism as well as those who approve of the new program. – See more at: nationalreport.net/gay-to-straight-program-to-be-used-in-all-arizona-public-school-curriculums-begin…
Jewish Steel
@BGinCHI: An enterprising GOP would begin sowing the seeds now. “Primaries are for the Democrat Party. Secret caucusing has always been the GOP way!”
Roger Moore
@EconWatcher:
How many of the Big Business types who are pulling the Republican strings are that well connected to reality? The Koch brothers almost certainly aren’t. I simply lack faith that anyone in a position of authority in the Republican party is sane enough to think about this stuff sensibly. They’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid.
hildebrand
The question I have is this – when will the establishment Republicans finally pull the car over and tell the tea-party types that it is time to shut up? I get that they fear being primaried, but it is evident that no matter what happens they will get a primary opponent. Knowing this, why is it that the establishment people never simply realize that it is about GOTV, and therefore if they did that, they could cut the wackos off at the knees. Outwork them. They are not the majority in this country – so don’t allow yourself to trampled by them.
Yes, you may lose an election every now and then, but a great many independents and right-leaning Democrats would love to see a mainstream Republican stand up to the insane people (see: Christie, Chris). If you know the loons are going after you, go after them, bury them as the loons that they are. Don’t put up with the nonsense – they are mostly bullying types anyway, stand up to them and reveal them as the freak-show that they are. Don’t let yourself get steamrolled. And never try to go the right of them, it is impossible, and they all have to know that. So don’t play their game.
Gah – why are the Republicans so stupid when it comes to this stuff?
The Red Pen
Your crazy of the day:
Obama Bankrolled Attack On The Benghazi Consulate.
I keep thinking that it’s too good to be true, but the “conservative” strategy seems to be “ratchet up the crazy until we win!”
Ahh says fywp
The grift must go on.
askew
Boehner is going to have to rely on the Dem party to pass the debt ceiling limit. There is no way that he’ll let Congress get shutdown and he has no control over his caucus.
eemom
Great song, which of course could have been written yesterday instead of 1965.
Roger Moore
@Ahh says fywp:
Didn’t Celine Dione sing about that?
Emerald
I’m becoming pretty sure now that they really are going to shut ‘er down. They can’t help themselves.
Last year we were told by all the Serious People that the sequester would never happen, because sanity would prevail.
Yup. I’d put my money, if I had any, on a shutdown.
Davis X. Machina
Enraged, committed minorities roll apathetic, detached majorities all the time. Within parties, outside parties, in primaries, general elections, doesn’t matter.
If you have crawl-over-broken-glass-to-vote voters, you don’t need all that many of them.
How many crawl-over-broken-glass-to-vote Democrats have you met? Crawl-over-broken-glass-to-vote Republicans?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@max:
The Obama admin has already given then a taste of that with the Sequester – all the socialism the Red States love gets the axe. In fact that’s the reason for the whole budget mess in The House because those teatards Reps want the other guy’s socialism cut but not theirs’.
Emerald
@askew: A very good point, but I’m not sure he can break the Hastert Rule this time.
He’d lose his speakership, which after all, is the most important thing. I mean, this is a Republican we’re talking about.
KG
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: it’s 27% that’s the magic number… though 37% is definitely in the same zip code.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@askew: all through the primaries, as they insulted him and made him jump through hoops and dance for them, I kept waiting for Romney to say, “You know what? Fuck you goobers. I’m going to go enjoy my beautiful wife, my fifteen acres on a lake front, and my gold dubloon room– yeah, Cracker Barrel coupon clippers, that’s exactly what you think it is. Willard, out!” Same thing with Boehner, he’s got money and as weak and pathetic as he is, the pastures of tall grass are his for the taking. “Hey Eric? You want this fuckin’ job of scorpion-juggling, you pasty faced little rat fucker? Have fun, Ima go play golf and quit even pretending to sober up for TV cameras”
Redshift
@Jewish Steel:
It’s too late for that to save them; the teabaggers are inside the house! Er, I mean, party! As the Virginia nominating convention this year showed, the people who participate in a closed nominating process are more crazy than primary voters, not less.
Chris
@hildebrand:
If the big money stops financing the teabaggers, the teabaggers’ ability to primary candidates they don’t like will go down drastically. Especially if you toss in the authoritarian-follower mindset of the GOP base.
The question is, how many of the big donors actually perceive that the teabaggers are more of a hinderance than a help? So far it still seems like a minority.
Roger Moore
@Redshift:
And the Senate.
askew
@Emerald:
I don’t know if he would lose his speakership, because I don’t think anyone else wants that shit job right now. The entire caucus is unmanageable since it is filled with crazies who can’t be reasoned with.
And if Boehner won’t violate the Hastert rule, they can do a discharge petition to force a vote. There has to be about 30 Republicans who would sign on to that because their district is too moderate for them to survive in 2014 after a GOP shutdown. 1994 wasn’t that long ago and they remember what happened to Newt and other Republicans after the shutdown.
SFAW
Re: default spurred by the Rethugs:
For awhile, I’ve said (when it’s apropos) that most of the Rethugs are treasonous bastards.
While that’s still true, I think pushing for default, and it’s (possible/probable?) resulting effect on the world economy might up the game into “crimes against humanity” territory.
All it would take would be a few blue-helmets pulling The Turtle, Cantor, and Ryan out in cuffs for certain treasonous bastard to get the message. (The majority of them wouldn’t, of course, but them’s the breaks.)
NonyNony
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
My view of Mitt Romney would have improved by 10000% if he’d done that. 15000% if you replace “gold dubloon room” with “a swim in my Money Bin” (because Scrooge McDuck reference for the win).
This still would have left Mitt Romney somewhere between “Ronald Reagan” and “toe fungus”, but an improvement is an improvement!
Yeah – I don’t know what’s up with Boehner. He’s clearly nuts because he obviously doesn’t want the damn job but he just won’t turn it over to Cantor. Why not? What’s he got to lose? His dignity? HAhAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…
Jewish Steel
@Redshift: The secret caucus I’m imagining consists of Reinhold Reince Priebus and a bunch of asshole Wall St types picking some pliable white-guy-in-a-suit who cares fuck-all about culture wars shit.
SFAW
@Chris:
What, did the Koch brothers die, and CNN didn’t cover it?
? Martin
@Chris:
That’s not actually a useful question. The current state of things is that the Koch Brothers alone could keep the tea party running just fine. The tyranny of wealth.
Jewish Steel
Anagram:
Reinhold Reince Priebus = Incredible Phonier Ruse
Chris
@KG:
If I remember the Crazification Factor post correctly, their point (however comedically made) was that 27% is the hard core of absolute come-hell-or-high-water true believers who would stick with the GOP under any circumstances. Like, even if the Republican candidate promised that starting a nuclear war with Russia would be his first act in office, even if the Republican candidate was caught on video personally executing babies, even if Jesus of Nazareth came back and personally told them that the Republican candidate was the Antichrist, they’d still vote for him.
27% is the floor, the absolute minimum amount of votes the GOP can count on under the worst possible circumstances… Not the maximum.
Emerald
@askew: Aha! I think you’ve hit on it! Indeed, a discharge petition would save the day.
(Always presuming the Dems want to stop the fools from shutting ‘er down. They absolutely have to stop them from defaulting on the debt certainly, but shutting the gov down when the Rs would take the blame and then possibly lose the House, thereby giving the Dems a chance to govern again . . . that would take some thought.)
Chris
@? Martin:
Could they really? There have always been and will always be a few big corporations and super-rich dynasties willing to finance teabagger-like movements. Back in the fifties and sixties, the Koch family and some other people like that were still financing the John Birchers… but most of the Wall Street crowd had made its peace with the New Deal (hence “Rockefeller Republican”).
Even if the teabaggers have a few rich backers to keep them alive, if most of the wealthy are willing to back other candidates, that makes a difference if only in terms of evening the scales.
SFAW
@Chris:
I think the Koch’s are willing to spend whatever it takes, and they can, because the end result will reward them manifold.
Roger Moore
@Chris:
If there were actually a cabal of ultra-rich, sane Republican donors who were going to swoop in and prevent the party from trying to destroy the American economy, I think they would have done something already.
Suzanne
O/T. I had this done this morning and now I am sore and laying in bed enjoying Vicodin. Waaaaah.
I really wish that birth control didn’t feel like getting kicked in the twat sometimes. At least it was free. Thanks, President Obama!
schrodinger's cat
The insane have overtaken the asylum. They deny science and reality. Unfortunately for us they have too much power.
Patricia Kayden
No matter what Repubs do, healthcare reform is here to stay. And many Repub Governors have no problem quietly signing on to many of its popular provisions.
tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/08/republican-governors-shhh-obamacare-medicaid.php
And many younger Repubs are signing up for it.
nbcnews.com/health/even-republican-young-adults-want-health-insurance-poll-finds-6C10963044
Citizen_X
@EconWatcher: As others have said, American businessmen are as crazy–and as stupid–as your average Tea Partier. They get their news from Fox exclusively. They speak to no one but fellow Republicans. They tanked the world economy, but they still believe they’re Galtian masters of the universe.
They’re rich. How can they possibly be wrong?
Chris
@Roger Moore:
@Citizen_X:
I think that’s mostly true but slightly more complicated. Businessmen as a class have drunk a lot of kool aid, and some of them will never stop funding the teabagger nuttiness. At the same time, I think there are also businessmen out there who would stop funding the teabaggers if it became absolutely clear that backing them was a political loser…
… but so far, that hasn’t become clear. Supporting the teabaggers worked out for them in 2010. Thanks to gerrymandering it’ll continue to work out for them at least until the end of the decade – even if the teabaggers lose seats, they’ll still be in a position to seriously obstruct any liberal reforms for at least that long. So far, it’s a good investment for them. Maybe after 2020 it won’t be, but they’ll worry about that then.
(In the same way, it took at least 20 years after FDR’s first election before Wall Street finally got the message that economic royalism wasn’t winning elections anymore and that it was better to start supporting moderates like Eisenhower. So, for our purposes, I suppose it doesn’t really matter – if it’s anything like last century, we’ll basically have to win electorally on every front before Wall Street starts backing moderates).
Turgidson
@Chris:
Derived from the 2004 Keyes vs. Obama Senate race. Both candidates were black so no Bradley effect to wonder about, one was obviously completely fucking insane AND a total fucking dick, while the other was mainstream, intelligent, likeable, and had a budding, and extremely positive, national profile. About as close as you can get these days to a controlled experiment.
Keyes got 27% in that race.
JPL
@raven: According to a Phoenix site, it’s a hoax. link
Roger Moore
@Chris:
Sure, but that’s not what we’ve been talking about; we’ve been talking about whether or not the Tea Party is going to get dropped because they’re a policy failure for trying to blow up the economy. There seems to be no sign of that whatsoever. The supposedly smart businesspeople seem perfectly content to let the Tea Party blow up the economy, and will only get upset if doing so is a political loser.
Tone In DC
LULz.
I appreciate your frankness and earnestness. All hail the Affordable Care Act (I had a molar extracted recently; the financial and physical pain will be lessened under the ACA the next time around).
Chris
@Roger Moore:
In that case yeah, pretty much.
At that level of wealth, I don’t think they care how badly the teabaggers fuck up the economy. They’re set for life no matter what happens.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@JPL: Poe’s Law
Calouste
@Turgidson:
Keyes was also about as an extreme an example of carpetbagging as you could get. He’d never lived in the state until he was drafted as the nominee less than three months before the election, and had previously run multiple times for office in a different state.
Where Obama had been a state Senator for 8 years.
schrodinger's cat
@Chris: Didn’t the French and the Russian royalty think that too?
Woodrowfan
@raven:
It’s a hoax. Always check Snopes first.
snopes.com/politics/satire/gaytostraight.asp
? Martin
@Chris:
It all depends on the degree of commitment. If the Kochs are willing to put billions behind the group, it’s unlikely that others would be willing to match that. Adelson singlehandedly kept a presidential primary candiate in the race for months. So yes, they can do it if they choose. The Kochs could easily match the entire DNC/DSC/DCCS in 2014 or 2016 if they so desired – liberal billionaires included.
boatboy_srq
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
IIRC that isn’t working so well. Look at TN: there are people whose homes are burning to the ground while the FD watches because the homeowners were too anti-tax to fund the FD properly and too cheap to pay the service charges the FD assesses to cover the protection. So they’re burned-out, homeless and POd at the firemen for not saving their houses and not the councilmen who listened when they said “no more taxes” and took them at their word. This is why sequestration won’t end well: the same volk who squeal when they’re taxed will throw tantrums at FEMA, SSA, HUD, DoA and all the other places they get help when the taps get turned off – instead of at Congress who turned the taps off at their insistence.
boatboy_srq
@NobodySpecial: Bumper sticker, seen on a Jeep (what else?) in NoVA: Paved Roads Are An Example of Wasteful Government Spending. Right next to the Teahadist license plate (because the Teahad doesn’t get enough $$$ from Koch, I guess).
Roger Moore
@boatboy_srq:
Was their a parking sticker from a defense contractor, too?
boatboy_srq
@Alexandra: And this is why I get peeved every time some Dem says “impeachment is off the table.” Dems seem committed to reserving it for something real – like pushing the wrong button and nuking a major US city with US munitions. The GOTea wants to use it b/c a Dem President so much as breathes.
boatboy_srq
@Roger Moore: They were across the median, through the soundwall and into the next subdivision before I could see much more.
Not really – but they were doing enough over the speed
limitsuggestion that I couldn’t keep up.boatboy_srq
@SFAW: You really want them to go off the wingnut edge from seeing the New World Government that they’re insisting is imminent (and part of BHO’s secret IslamoFascoSoshulist plan, too) show up to take them away, don’t you? Seriously. The fastest way for them to gain more followers is for them to be seen getting hauled off by UN peacekeepers while shouting “SEE! I was RIGHT!”
Fair Economist
Boehner’s speakership is not at risk. Many republican representatives really, really don’t want a tea partier speaker. Cantor is pretty interchangeable with Boehner and the Tea Partiers know it, so they won’t want him. So if Boehner is out, there’s not a majority for a Tea Party speaker nor a majority for an establishment speaker – making Pelosi kingmaker.
Even the Tea Party isn’t that stupid. Boehner is safe for this Congress, at least.
boatboy_srq
@max: Heh.
I’d go as far as “payout proportional to pay-in” metrics. It’d be interesting to hear all about the 47% “takers” then.
boatboy_srq
@Tone In DC: GOOD LUCK with that: dentistry is still “elective/cosmetic” for anything but preventative/ortho. Even under ACA. Why the medical insurance world still thinks teeth are ornamental escapes me.
Roger Moore
@boatboy_srq:
I think that was a realistic political calculation. Pelosi knew damn well that impeachment wasn’t going anywhere, since the Republicans in the Senate would never convict under any circumstances. She made a decision that impeachment would wind up as a political circus that would distract from the necessary work of governing and wind up making the Democrats look ridiculous. That’s one of the results of the Clinton impeachment: people will see any move to impeach as a narrowly political decision rather than a serious attempt to get at real problems.
@boatboy_srq:
Something they obviously would have no trouble doing without those wasteful, government-funded roads.
boatboy_srq
@Roger Moore:
FIFY. Dems respect the procedure. For the Teahad it’s still a primary-winning proposal, and something we’re still hearing about from multiple Congresscritters as an item for the next session.
Roger Moore
@boatboy_srq:
I think most people will see it as a purely political thing. That’s really what Coburn is saying here: that they’re planning on impeaching him but just need to figure out why. If the teabaggers are being that open about it among themselves, you can be sure that everyone else (except, perhaps, for the Villagers, who will pretend that it’s all about real crimes) will see it the same way. It’s just that the teabaggers are the only ones who will see it as a positive rather than an insane abuse of the system. It didn’t help them the last time they tried it, and doing it to Obama when they can’t even find as flimsy an excuse as they had for Clinton is going to be a big-time loser.
J R in WV
@
Wag
@Chris:
You’re correct. 27% of the Illinois electorate voted for Allen Keys
SFAW
@boatboy_srq:
Yeah, I realized the potential downside when I wrote it. I console myself with the idea that it may, finally, spur them all to move to Dumbfuckistan (a/k/a Tejas a/k/a Nuevo Aztlan) and then secede. And, except for having relatives I love living in Austin, I don’t see a downside to that series of events.
SFAW
@Fair Economist:
Assertion is not proof, you know.
SFAW
@boatboy_srq:
See, I would have figured that to be an anti-Teahadi sticker.
Seriously. Because there ain’t many people who think paved roads are a bad thing. And the ones that do aren’t living in NoVA, they’re out in the wilds of … I don’t know, Wyoming? Idaho? Montana?
SFAW
@J R in WV:
I respectfully disagree.
I think.
xenos
@Chris: Most of the big money being funneled to the teabaggers/birchers is oil money. This is the parasites’ parasite. Kochs don’t care if the Walton’s customers are ruined, or about Bank of America’s customers, or ADM’s consumers.
Fred
The TPers know they can shut-er-down ’cause it don’t matter fuck all an’ besides, if it crashes the economy it’s all Obama’s fault, like everything else. Right?
boatboy_srq
@SFAW: Had it been on something that’s paved-road-specific (say, a Caddy STS), I’d buy that. It was on a JEEP. Those were MADE for offroad. And VA is about two decades behind in infrastructure maintenance: it’s easy to build a new road, but once it’s built – forget it. Only SC has worse roads among the Eastern states (no thanks to Gov. Ultrasound for his
gas-guzzler rebate“transportation package”).You’d be surprised just how many Teahadists are in NoVa, especially western Loudoun County – and how many of them work for either a US or state agency or for a public-sector contractor. And paved roads to these volk are some mystery thing that magically appear across their pastures/fields, but once they’re there Big Gubmint keeps sending people out to tear up (one lane at a time) and rebuild, destroying their commute times and driving pleasure. The whinging about the Metro’s Silver Line out in the hinterlands is amazing: you’d think from all their noise that the District was conspiring against Good Right-Thinking Patriotic Xtian Hetero Real Ahmurrcans™ out that way, and planning on using the new service to ship every last ni-CLANG in DC and PG County out there to drop on their doorsteps just to p!ss them off. It really is Ahmurrca for Straight Xtian White People in that part of the world.
boatboy_srq
@SFAW: Secession doesn’t work all that well: there’s a pretty serious precedent against it. Expulsion, now, is a different kettle of fish – and I’m all for voting to expel Greater Kochistan from The Union.
SFAW
@boatboy_srq:
Key word is “WERE.” These days, not so much.
I also see plenty of Range Rovers and Land Rovers with plenty of heavy-duty brush guards on front, etc. – and looking like they’ve never been within 10 miles of brush, mud, gravel, what-have-you. And, no, they don’t clean up as good as what I’ve seen, if they’ve REALLY been off-road.
Be that as it may: I still don’t see it as a Teahadi saying. Whether it’s making fun of Teahadis, or proclaiming how rugged they are because “We don’t need no steenking roads!”, it still strikes me as a gag sticker.
SFAW
@boatboy_srq:
You’re splitting semantic hairs. Yes, I realize the two actions have different geneses, but the practical end result would be the same.
And, although Lincoln fought to preserve the Union, a reasonably convincing case could be made to let Dumbfuckistan (not Kochistan, please get your terms right) secede, although it could be phrased along the lines of “Oh noes, Gov Goodhair, do whatever you like, jes’ please don’ throw
DumbfuckistanTexas into that briar patch.”Because back in the 1860s, there were some pretty good reasons not to let the South secede. Today: there are some REALLY good reasons to get all of them in one place, and tell them “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” Expulsion, no matter how justified, could conceivably exacerbate the split, because those assholes hate being told what to do by the government. For example: “We’re going to give you free healthcare, just sign up here.” “Fuck you! I like paying $20,000 a year to be told my condition isn’t covered! Next you’ll try to take away my 483 assault rifles and 92 RPGs! Go back to Russia, you damn commie! Fuck you!”
Either way, as long as they get the fuck out of my country without an armed insurrection, so that the rest of us can get back to work fixing things, that’ll be OK.