Midnight In The Garden Of Goobers And Weasels cont.
Nearly seven inches of rain fell in about ninety minutes in Chicago early this morning. Awakened by the commotion, I can tell you it was as if my apartment was going through a carwash. It was the highest daily rain total for this city, which is home territory for torrential downpours, in 140 years of record keeping. Number two, by the way, about a half-inch shy of this morning's sum, was three years ago.
Yep my friends, something is abroad in the land, a system-wide disdain for human plans and political positions, an indifference to the best made plans. New rules are in place and even the stupidest climate-change denier must be feeling a certain unease at this summer's events.
No, check that, the stupidest ones likely think this is part of some great plan in which they have starring roles to play. That is certainly the case in D.C. (because everything is connected) where I now put even odds on default, a drop from 3-1 against in a few days. Stated earlier are the four reasons why I think it'll happen. The fifth being that the president, as I thought, for all his high-minded policy flexibility, can and did draw a line.
According to the L.A. Times, the collapse came when the White House wanted to up the scope of the deal to something along the lines of the senate work group proposal (let us note in passing, a fairly rightest plan), while the GOP wanted to hold the health insurance mandate hostage to insure Democratic complicity to tax "reforms". This strikes me as the last cards from both sides; the President wanted something transformative, and the GOP wanted a scalp.
It is worth noting that Republicans are mainly trying to make substantial policy changes divorced from writing and voting on any distinct legislation doing so. I know I'm a little boring on the subject, but this is a tactic of a bankrupt political party; its articulated policies are broadly unpopular, its ruling philosophy utterly schitzophrenic, its leadership fractured, and with yet enough power to presume to control events even as events spin out of anyone's control.
The Republic has been here before, and while I can't say if the collapse of the Whig party led inevitably to the Civil War, or if momentum towards the war tore apart the Whigs, the two events are intimately connected. Though I have been predicting the end of the GOP for a while, what I didn't appreciate until very recently is how when one party in a two party system implodes, the consequences for the nation, in the short term at least, are really very serious.
Yep my friends, something is abroad in the land, a system-wide disdain for human plans and political positions, an indifference to the best made plans. New rules are in place and even the stupidest climate-change denier must be feeling a certain unease at this summer's events.
No, check that, the stupidest ones likely think this is part of some great plan in which they have starring roles to play. That is certainly the case in D.C. (because everything is connected) where I now put even odds on default, a drop from 3-1 against in a few days. Stated earlier are the four reasons why I think it'll happen. The fifth being that the president, as I thought, for all his high-minded policy flexibility, can and did draw a line.
According to the L.A. Times, the collapse came when the White House wanted to up the scope of the deal to something along the lines of the senate work group proposal (let us note in passing, a fairly rightest plan), while the GOP wanted to hold the health insurance mandate hostage to insure Democratic complicity to tax "reforms". This strikes me as the last cards from both sides; the President wanted something transformative, and the GOP wanted a scalp.
It is worth noting that Republicans are mainly trying to make substantial policy changes divorced from writing and voting on any distinct legislation doing so. I know I'm a little boring on the subject, but this is a tactic of a bankrupt political party; its articulated policies are broadly unpopular, its ruling philosophy utterly schitzophrenic, its leadership fractured, and with yet enough power to presume to control events even as events spin out of anyone's control.
The Republic has been here before, and while I can't say if the collapse of the Whig party led inevitably to the Civil War, or if momentum towards the war tore apart the Whigs, the two events are intimately connected. Though I have been predicting the end of the GOP for a while, what I didn't appreciate until very recently is how when one party in a two party system implodes, the consequences for the nation, in the short term at least, are really very serious.
posted by Will Divide at 12:22 PM
1 Comments:
Thank you for this analysis, which I find valid even though the facts didn't quite line up the way you predicted. (I would say they lined up somewhat worse--you may disagree.)
Given what we now know about the "super"-committee and the President's call for another (paid-for) stimulus to improve the unemployment rate (and his chances for re-election), what would you say are the prospects for the GOP to survive for, let's say, the next 5 years? (In its present form, I mean; not the hybrid tea-party/military-industrial-complex flashmob into which it currently seems poised to morph.)
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