TPM reports that the Democrats in Congress may be coming to the conclusion that the Republicans have no interest in fixing the economy. Excuse me, but if they’re just beginning to tumble to this now, then we have some seriously dim-witted people in the House and Senate. This has been official Republican policy, announced by party leader Rush Limbaugh himself, since the very first day of the Obama Administration. There is something almost surreal about this, and yet it seems to reflect the reality. On the one side you have a party that is completely dominated by, and populated (at least in Congress) by cynics that are perfectly willing to destroy the country and the economy in order to get and keep power. On the other side you have a party that appears to consist entirely of Charley Browns, who can’t believe, in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, that the next time John Boehner or Mitch McConnell won’t snatch the football. A work of fiction based on that premise would be considered too unrealistic to publish.
Of course, it’s always possible that the Democrats have known what the Republicans were doing all along, and played their roles in order to make it seem like there was an actual competitive political process out there and that it was not preordained that we would be handed over to our Galtian overlords. Some might argue that this account makes more sense. After all, the idea that the entire Democratic caucus is composed of very naïve and very stupid people seems farfetched. It doesn’t seem plausible that people with such characteristics could be successful enough politicians to get to the high offices that these folks occupy. And yet, there they are. We must accept that they are as easily deluded as the Penzance Pirates, or we must believe that they have no interest in stopping the Republicans. And that would be unduly cynical, wouldn’t it?