… nuclear economic annihilation.
I have one particular critic who feels that I am bigoted against my former political party. Perhaps. I tried to explain a little light-heartedly, I am like a woman scorned. As people who have followed my tenacious, if failed, attempt to get a referendum on the Red Plan it shouldn’t surprise them that I stayed a Republican for a decade after it became obvious that the Republicans were continuing to ratchet up their purges of moderates. I always found this very ironic because it was Republicans who reveled in accusations that liberals (meaning Democrats) were politically correct or PC. Political Correctness is simply the veneration of an idea over experience.
Democrats engage in it too. In the 1970’s and 80’s Democrats drove out pro lifers in their own purges. Many of their refugees joined the GOP which had the effect of stimulating a similar purge of pro choice Republicans. Among the many ironies of the changes in the make up of our nation’s two parties is the South’s switch to the Republican Party after a century of reviling the “Party of Lincoln.” Indeed the hospitality of the Grand Old Party to southern pols has given it the appearance of the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun. Popular Sovereignty anyone?
The purges have made the GOP, once hopefully described by Saint Reagan as a “big tent,” into a party which practices purges as mercilessly and frequently as Joseph Stalin. The GOP’s running dogs are pragmatic RINO’s. After helping the deficit skyrocket the GOP is now treating the nation’s debt ceiling as though it was the Cuban Missile Crisis. The same phenomenon is happening in Minnesota, Wisconsin and a few other Republican dominated states.
I was very interested in this post by George Bush’s old speech writer David Frum where he twits Obama for being weak in dealing with the GOP as they flirt with Armegeddon.
Obama is of course being reasonable. I think its time for him to be as unreasonable as the GOP. Frum had a suggestion that I think Obama would be well advised to put it into effect. I would recommend it to Minnesota’s Governor Mark Dayton over allowing the state to be shut down if, that is, the state constitution gives him the power to exercise this option:
Beyond that why isn’t he [Obama] yelling his head off about the Republican default threat? Why isn’t he being specific about what it could mean? And why isn’t he doing what Lyndon Johnson would do, making it clear that if H-Hour does arrive, he’ll use disbursement power just as politically as Republicans are using the power of the debt ceiling: eg, paying Medicaid bills from Blue states first, Red states later? Paying farmers and other Republican constituencies with IOUs, while hoarding cash for Democratic voters?
If nothing else, Obama could make the threat. It would give a few Republicans an excuse to be pragmatists in the face of their party’s inflexible dogma.
