A question of shrillness

David Axelrod--in Michael Grunwald's aptly named Swampland of "The Party of No" (an article adapted from the author's The New New Deal)--suggests, without suggesting it, a revisitation of what constitutes "shrill": 

It was stunning that we’d set this up [a 2009 pre-stimulus-vote confab between Obama and House Republicans] and before hearing from the President, they’d say they were going to oppose this. Our feeling was, we were dealing with a potential disaster of epic proportions that demanded cooperation. If anything was a signal of what the next two years would be like, it was that.

Even worse have been the last two years.

The seed of Republicans' malignant siege, though, was the stimulus affair, whose lead-up loosely coincided with Jeb Bush and Eric Cantor's Sitzkrieg of a "Listening Tour." Remember that? Mr. Cantor's deceitful ass on highstools in pizza parlors, pretending to ponder scattered electoral urgings for the GOP to act like responsible adults? Cantor played along. Hmmm. Good thought, Sir. Oh, nice thinking, Madam. And all the while he and Messrs. Boehner and McConnell were plotting a sabotage of the president's recovery efforts as a real "disaster of epic proportions that demanded cooperation" played out.

Now that, I'd call shrill. Indeed I would go so far as to call it treasonous. Republicans didn't oppose Obama's stimulus package because they were philosophically opposed to stimulus measures; they had voted many times under many Republican presidents for the same spending. Rather they were opposed simply because they politically opposed President Obama; and to complicate his tenure, they were eager to betray millions of Americans with prolonged and needless suffering.

In short Republican pols in the last Congress and this have proved themselves to be sadistic, sociopathic bastards who are probably feted at al Qaeda tea parties. America faces no external threat as monumentally twisted and vicious as internal Republicanism. The contemporary GOP peddles a Hobbesian state of nature in which Americans' lives are not merely brutish and nasty and short(er), but acutely divided and thereby rather easily oppressed as well.

Some of modern journalism's self-appointed hall monitors--those pious acolytes of preening civility--have ruled the above sort of observations out of bounds, strident, shrill. But of course they don't live daily with the squalid material consequences of shrill Republican malice.

Comments

[japa21]

"In short Republican pols in the last Congress and this have proved themselves to be sadistic, sociopathic bastards who are probably feted at al Qaeda tea parties."

I want to thank you for not losing track of the need for civility and avoiding letting how you really feel out.

That said, you are 100% correct. Never has a political party been this much against what is good for the country. They may use langauge to explain why what they are doing is good for the country, but the proof is in their actions. If things that they approved were good for the country in the past, why are they no longer good.

This is the only time in our history where a major crisis has faced this country and there has even been a question about ttrying to fund a response. In the past, even wrongly at times, it has been, "whatever it takes."

[Jimiskin]

Treason it indeed is , and it is past time it was called just that and treated as such.

[AMS]

Why isn't this story front-page news in every paper in the country? I regard Mr. Grunwald's revelations as unmasking a scandal far, far worse than Watergate. In the face of the most serious financial crisis in seventy years, with millions of Americans losing their jobs, accumulated wealth melting away as people on the verge of retirement and parents who thought their college funds were secure saw their savings vanish overnight, one of our two major political parties decided to thwart the new President's attempts to save the economy from collapse at every turn, opposing everything he proposed on principle, regardless of the merits of the proposal, whether they had favored the same thing in the past, and the effect on the lives of their constituents. I thought nothing about the Republican Party could shock me, but this has. Why isn't it leading every newscast?