I have been perhaps overly hard on Ross Douthat over the years, though I can say with some pride that I haven’t called him “Ross Dumbfuck” since 2012. But, well, that was then and this is now. Ross more or less hits it out of the park with his latest column, “House Republicans Go Off the Cliff”, acknowledging that the passage of Lyin’ Paulie Ryan’s Health Care “Reform” Bill, and the orgies of self-congratulation that followed, demonstrate that there is no point in writing articles about the struggle for the “soul” of the Republican Party, because it no longer has one.
Granted, Ross isn’t quite that brutal, but almost:
“OVER the last seven years, the Republican Party has engaged in increasingly elaborate political suicide attempts. The G.O.P. has nominated cranks and erstwhile witches and Todd Akin in winnable Senate races. It has engaged in Somme-esque trench warfare within its own congressional caucus, shut down the government without a strategy for winning anything out of it, and campaigned on a sub-Ayn Randian narrative about the heroic businessman and the mooching 47 percent. And then, after all its prior efforts at seppuku failed, the party nominated Donald Trump for the presidency.”
Gross and grotesque as Trump’s nomination was, according to Ross, it might have been the salvation of the party, allowing it to cast off its “sub-Ayn Randian narrative” and start legislating for “the people.” Instead, the party, with Trump’s massively ignorant hand jammed down hard on the throttle, doubled down on its own massive ignorance and contempt for the people, going on record as the party that traded the health insurance of millions of low-income old folks for tax cuts for the rich. The Republicans can be saved from electoral disaster by the incompetence of the Democrats, says Ross, but the party itself is already dead.
Afterwords
Feeling wonky? Reason’s Peter Suderman, writing in the New York Times, explains why the Republican bill is so awful, and why the Republicans, led by Trump, insisted on passing it anyway. It’s the tax cuts for the rich, stupid!
