Dave Weigel has a nice piece over at Slate explaining why the Tea Party Republicans in the House won’t negotiate with Obama. Because they think he’s lying, about everything. Everything that anyone in the Executive Branch says about the government shutdown and the debt ceiling is a lie. In fact, any statement, by any expert, that supports the president’s position must be a lie. If they say there is danger, well, that proves that there isn’t any danger. So as long as people keep warning about “danger,” well, that proves we don’t have anything to worry about. And if something does break, it will be Obama’s fault, because he didn’t do the right thing, whatever it was, just as, according to Ron Paul, Lincoln caused the Civil War. There was another guy who wouldn’t negotiate.
And Eric Posner has a nice piece in the New Republic explaining why Obama needs to let things fall apart: the public will accept “arguably” extra-constitutional actions by the President as long as they believe the country is in a real crisis. And the only way to do that, for real, is to have a real crisis, not the prospect of one.
Several years ago, Obama more or less lamented that he came into office before the Great Contraction was ripe enough to convince people that we were in an unlimited emergency. In fact, it’s at least “arguable” (once more) that the Great Contraction constituted a graver danger than the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which have in fact never been repeated on any sort of significant scale, unless, like Bill Kristol, you were really afraid of the underwear bomber.
The Wall Street boys will moan about the need to compromise, but until stocks start dropping by a thousand points a day, they aren’t going to get on the horn to House Speaker Boehner and tell him that if he doesn’t fix things now they’ll be putting all their chips on Hillary in 2016. And so we’re going to have to wait a while.
Afterwords
Why do the heathen rage? Why do Republicans detest Democratic presidents as a compulsion? Clinton was as hated as Obama, when stocks were soaring and deficits were disappearing. Plus, no national health care! I hate to get all socio-cultural on your ass, but I would point you to yet another article, this one an interview with Justice Scalia in New York magazine, in which Nino bemoans the “shrill” liberalism of the Washington Post, which he no longer reads. Well, I no longer read it either, but it’s not because of any shrill liberalism. In fact, I would say that the Post’s liberalism has been trending downwards ever since the election of President Reagan. Into the early oughties, at least, the Post’s editorial page did cling to the “standard” liberal line that it was an outrage that the U.S. lacked universal healthcare, but otherwise the Post’s political liberalism was tepid at best.
Social liberalism is another matter, gay rights in particular. For decades, the Post couldn’t get enough of those fabulous gays, who were just like us, only cooler. Since I don’t really see the Post any more, I can’t say for sure that that still isn’t the case, but I had the strong impression, as the Post and I were going our separate ways, it wasn’t the case. Back in the day, the Post took it for granted that J. Edgar Hoover and best boy Clyde Tolson were a pair of old queens. In today’s Post, apparently, they were just good friends.
Um, was I talking about Justice Scalia? Yeah. I think it was the gay thing that pissed Scalia off. In his book, homos were homos, pure and simple. How can a man sit down to his breakfast and read about a bunch of damn homos? It’s fucking insane. For Scalia and his ilk, all they can see in the U.S. is wall to wall homos, and maybe a bunch of damn immigrants. They’re mad, and madness must find release. And so they hate the Democratic president as the symbol and source of the hateful world they live in.
