Truth-2-Power on the Boner

Can Speaker Boehner End the Internal Terrorism That Is the Tea Party?

December 21, 2012 at 9:49 am

Grover Norquist’s Christmas present came early this year. The Tea Party, the monkey wrench which he and his billionaire backers dropped into the machinery of government, proved that Teahadi Republicans can still break the House of Representatives even when more of their the GOP caucus has entered post-election 12 step KoolAid-Anon programs.

Last night Mr. Boehner was handed a huge defeat that will set off waves of lemming panic on Wall Street today. He lobbed yet another meaningless, symbolic bill full of goodies for the Tea Party Teahadis in his caucus as a “Plan B” solution to the illusionary fiscal cliff which he and the other Republican lemmings seem to be running for full tilt.

It was another dumb show to appease Mr. Norquist, the Brothers Koch, and the other heavy funders of the Republican Party from the 1%.  It had zero chance of passing. It was a waste of the taxpayer’s money to even keep the lights on in the House of Representatives for another of the hundred or so symbolic bills that the GOP has put out to stomp their feet or dig their heels in.

As I’ve told you months ago, the Republicans have been engaged in a multi-year Uncivil War.  Two extremist groups, the Neocons and the Libertarians, are fighting for control of the party.  The mainstream media is touting this as a fail for Boehner, which is true,  but they’re still missing the High Noon moment that yesterday’s failure of Republicans to gridlock in lockstep, as they’ve been doing over the last four years, really is.  We have entered the phase of open hand-to-hand combat.

Without the racist bogeyman of re-electing a black president, the GOP, wholly out of touch with the rising minority majority of 2016, the huge deficits caused largely by two wars and staving off the Wall Street melt-down, AND the downgrade of United States credit to their names, is doomed to fall apart.

Neocon Republicans, fearing  extinction, were not ready to vote for Mr. Boehner’s show “Plan B” proposal that included tax breaks for millionaires and a slashing of food stamps.

Not that they’re against that sort of thing, mind you, but many realize that this exercise in political Kobuki theater this late in the game, as they’re staring at  running the country over the fake fiscal cliff in less than two weeks WITH holidays, can still snap the fragile economy in two.

It will be yet another recession for which they will squarely be blamed again by the American voter if they do not come up with something more substantive than the usual Reactionary Red Kool Aid that they’ve been serving up with Mr. Boehner’s endless mock legislation of the last two years.

It will be the end of the Republican Party if they cannot effectively participate in governing the country.

Some of these Emperors, apparently, have discovered that they’re buck naked after all.

We are ten days away from a self-imposed line in the sand that the Congress put in place to trigger action and cooperation on the budget. It will not be possible because the Tea Party element of the Republican Caucus doesn’t really care.

Teahadis are not there to engage in consensus.  The Libertarian Dead Billionaires Club wing of the Party, voiced by the Koch Brothers, Foster Freiss et al, and their Junior League, the Club for Growth, have spent decades pruning the House of Representatives to make it most unrepresentative, and to force government to break.

We’ve seen the GOP turn its back on countless polls and even the very clear message sent by the American people in the last election because Teahadi lemmings bask in the warm green glow of the cash being lobbed at them.

Libertarians want small to no government. Destroying it is their plan to get their wish to have a society run largely by the corporates, with everything you do, from birth to education to your death to be a profit center for the handful that reap in so much and give back to so few.

The whole purpose of the Tea Party was not to create legislation. Its purpose is chaos. They are the monkey wrench drops into the gears of government, sand to gum up the oil of compromise that has kept American politics running for centuries. They are Mr. Norquist’s evil spawn.

Osama bin Laden would drool at Mr. Norquist’s plot. Destroying the government from within, and jeopardizing the fragile recovery, which showed improved signs as estimates were upgraded yesterday,  is no less an act of terror than blowing up a pair of towers. He wanted a Rubber Stamp president to do the bidding of his American Legislation Exchange Council, which seeks to write law from outside the government and hand it off to their turniphead Teahadi minions and a Mitt-like president who sign off on it without scrutiny or objection.

Politics has become religion for the Far Right. The Tea Party operates from an absolutist dogmatic faith in Grover and his employers from the 1%, devoid of intellect, reason or that most American of political groundings, common sense.

Mr. Boehner is now faced with the seminal moment of his Speakership.  He can rally the Neocon Republicans, swallow a large slice of humble pie along with his meal of crow, and align with Mrs. Pelosi’s Democrats.  He can get a deal done with the White House, and destroy the political cancer on the body politic that is Grover Norquist’s Tea Party, OR he can try to hold the GOP together through more fantasy votes on phony bills that have about as much chances of working at the Mayan doomsday did of preventing the sunrise this morning.

The issue is not the fiscal cliff:  It is whether the Speaker has the intestinal fortitude to put the Tea Party down, pull the monkey wrench out of the cogs of government, and restore order to the political system.

If he did it, he would be hailed as perhaps one of the greatest Speakers in American history, and set himself up for a long run in that chair, and probably even save his party.

Kool Aid addiction is worse than heroine, or crack cocaine, though. We’ve seen repeatedly how the GOP lives inside their own hard-core bubble.  Last night was no different. They have gone home, without so much as a promise to the American people to resolve their difficulties and return to do the people’s business which they were allegedly elected to do.

Which is why the GOP is doomed to destruction, and another fiscally conservative party, at least if history is an indicator will rise.

Last night was High Noon Mel Brooks style. The President is standing at the other end of D.C. armed with common sense and the willingness to cut a deal.  Speaker Boehner and his GOP have their political weaponry pointed too,  but in a circular firing squad.

Get ready for the fiscal cliff, and the woe it will cause.  The Teahadis are doing what the Kochs pay them to do: Destroy government, and protect the rich.

My shiny two.