Hostage Taking

Imagine this scenario: a criminal has cloistered himself in a building somewhere and taken hostages. A  negotiator is dispatched, but a hostage is killed when, for whatever reason, the police fail to accede to the criminal's demands.

The criminal is eventually captured, but he blames the dead hostage on the police: "You didn't meet my demands. I had no choice but to kill a hostage." he says with a shrug.

That's essentially the scenario that is playing out right now in Washington. The Republicans have decided that they're so serious about their goal of repealing so-called "Obamacare" that they are willing to shut down the government if the president does not kowtow to their demand to defund health care reform.

So whose fault would it be if the government is eventually shut down due to such intransigence? Why, President Obama, of course!

"Well, the one who's threatening to shut down the government is the president and his Democratic allies. What they're basically saying is, unless the budget funds Obamacare, they won't support it. They're basically saying that, unless we fund Obamacare, they are willing to shut down the government.... [I]t's their insistence on continuing to pour money into this broken and failed experiment that is threatening a government shutdown, not us."

So said Marco Rubio recently during an interview with Sean Hannity.

Setting aside hostage-taking politics for a moment, there has been, for what seems like quite a while now, an 'Opposite Day' strategy among some Republicans to blatantly deny reality. They want to shut down the government over "Obamacare", but such a shut down would be Obama's fault. Waterboarding is OK, because it's not really torture, but "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques". Osama was caught on Obama's watch, which means that Dubya should be given credit.

It's like some members of the Republican party collectively suffer from cognitive distortion, defined by Wikipedia as "gross reshaping of external reality to meet internal needs". It's Republicans' world; we just live in it.

The $64,000 question is this: how long will the American people put up with being taken hostage by an increasingly radicalized Republican party?

The Party of the 'Little Guy'

From an excellent op/ed article written by Dana Milbank:

“The president claims his economic agenda is for the middle class. But it’s actually for the well-connected,” Paul Ryan, the GOP’s 2012 vice presidential nominee, wrote this week in USA Today, rejecting Obama’s latest proposal for a corporate tax cut. “There’s no doubt that it works well for them. But for the rest of us, it’s not working at all.”

Ryan, in his brief commentary, protested that Obama is “interested in tax reform for corporations — but not for families or small business.” He further accused Obama of implementing health-care and regulatory policies that favor big businesses and big banks.
That’s rich.

Source: The GOP Flips the Script on Obama

The Republican party's sudden shift to the party of the 'little guy' is nothing short of amazing.

Let's remember that this is the party that opposes regulation of any kind, opposed Wall Street reform, and constantly fights against people who work for a living (labor). In fact, most Republicans are quick to label as "Socialist" anything that smacks of even being moderately disapproving of big business.

Now the party of Donald Trump, Mitt Romney and the Koch brothers is suddenly positioning itself as the party of "joe six-pack"?

One just can't help but be astounded at the sheer chutzpah.

An aspect of this situation that Milbank did not address in his column is this: the fact that the sudden shift from a party of the rich and powerful to the party of "the little people" is less about genuine concern for the poor and more about cynical politics.

Republicans are desperate to do whatever they can to defund so-called "Obamacare" before it takes effect next year. So single-mindedly focused are they on this goal that many of them are willing to risk major political blowback by shutting down the government if Obama does not cave to their demands - a tactic that even uber-conservative Charles Krauthammer denounced as crazy in a recent column.

Unfortunately, Republican efforts to defund and/or discredit "Obamacare" are not going so well; there have been encouraging signs that health reform is actually working extremely well in those states that are already implementing changes: in Washington, Oregon and Maryland, insurance premiums are turning out to be lower than expected.

Sources: Medical Daily
              Washington Post

Republicans are left with few alternatives, so that means falling back on a tried-and-true tactic: throwing everything at Obama and seeing what sticks. If that means crying crocodile tears about the poor being screwed over in favor of the rich, in an attempt to discredit a federal program that will benefit the poor by allowing them to purchase health insurance, so be it. Destroying"Obamacare", it seems, is more important than, you know, actually giving a damn about the "joe six-packs" of the country.

The Republican Party At Work

Although we're much better off now that we were, say, this time four or five years ago, our country is still facing a number of very important issues both economic and domestic. But never fear - the Republican party has been hard at work trying to fix these problems in Congress!

...Or not.

I've said this before, and I will continue to harp on it: Three years ago, John Boehner couldn't stop talking about "jobs, jobs, jobs" while laying out his party's agenda for the upcoming legislative session:

“This speech is about jobs…because this coming election is about jobs,” Boehner told the welcoming campaign crowd in his home town. “It’s about the jobs that were promised to the American people by the current administration, and never delivered. It’s about the jobs our economy should be creating right now, but isn’t creating, because of the policies coming out of our Congress. It’s about the jobs our children deserve in the future, but may never have because Washington is burying them in a legacy of debt.”

Source: ABC News

Republicans handily won the midterm elections in what was almost universally seen as a "red tide" of opposition against Obama's agenda. Thus, everyone lived happily ever after because the Republicans worked their little butts off to create jobs for unemployed Americans, right?

Nope. Instead we got self-inflicted economic wounds:

Scariest Business Stories of 2011: Debt Ceiling Standoff
Sequestration Impact

Meaningless votes to repeal so-called "Obamacare":
Source: NBC News

Attempts to name bodies of water after Ronald Reagan:
Source: The Hill

Warring against women on several fronts:
Rape
Pay equity
Gender Roles
Abortion 


...as well as endless hearings on what have proven to be non-scandals:
MSNBC

Ladies and gentlemen, the GOP at work. With a record like this, it's a wonder to me why anyone would want to vote Republican.