We are no longer amused

Ezra Klein: "The Obama administration deserves all the criticism it's getting for the poor start of health law and more.... But the GOP's complaints that their plan to undermine the law worked too well and someone has to pay border on the comic."

I'm afraid the GOP has exhausted my sense of humor. Yes, Eric Cantor is sinisterly comic, and Louie Gohmert & Cast is pathetically comic, and Ted Cruz is frighteningly comic, and the party's erstwhile extortion scheme was so ineptly handled, even it bordered on the comical. But its current charade of outrage at Obamacare's technical flaws is the party's lowest, unfunniest fraud yet.

For me it's largely a cumulative thing. The Republican Party's least-presidential campaign ever--that 2012, suppurating boil of plutocratic arrogance and tea-party ferment--should have rested in peace. In the names of both honor and pragmatism the party should have forsworn the laughable swindles of Mitt Romney, and moved on. And for a few minutes after Election Day it seemed the GOP might, just might do the honorable, reasonable thing. But soon came its anti-immigration foaming and its anti-gun-safety slobbering and its Benghazi obsession and its IRS fixation and, and, and ...

Then the ineptest "comedy" ever, the Seinfeld Shutdown. But these abominations going on now--the party's glee at potentially screwing millions of the uninsured and its accomplished glee at having already screwed millions of the poverty-stricken uninsured and its faux rage at Obamacare's inadequacies and its absurd pretensions of competence and its sudden concern for surgical goo-gooism--all of it coming atop those brain-piercing months of Romney's swill and in general the GOP's grotesquery?

We are no longer amused.

Comments

[AnneJ]

What bothers me the most, is their sheer meanness, their open malice towards the poorest and most vulnerable. Not just with making a concerted effort to make sure that people go without health care, but also the savage cuts they are preparing to make in SNAP benefits while handing over billions more in giveaways to millionaire farmers, many of which are members of congress. They hide behind the bible as if that somehow conceals their naked cruelty towards the less fortunate. It seems as though they are doing everything they can to make the economy as horrible as possible, and then taking even more from the poor even as the demand for services rises. It is sick, just plain sick, and something is going to have to give soon.

[Peter G]

Be of good cheer Anne and esteemed host. I think we are privileged to witness one of those seminal moments in political history and that is the collapse of a long standing right wing coalition between business interest for whom ideology is merely a tool and the merely ideologically committed.

Panic on the right is growing and some exchanges of fire have taken place but nothing like what I think is to come. Once the heavy expenditures of money begin with the Rovians battling the Cruzians for party control this will, like all civil wars, be awesomely bloody and inevitably Pyrrhic no matter who "wins".

[Janicket]

Speaking of exchanges of fire, here's a salvo from a Taft of the Taft Republican dynasty:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/opinion/the-cry-of-the-true-republican.html?_r=0

Hear the RINOsaur roar!

[AnneJ]

Thank you, Peter. I just hope that the rest of the country doesn't have to be collateral damage in the process. And thank you, Janicket for that amazing op-ed!

[Suzanne Holland]

You give me hope Peter, but AnneJ everything you say so perfectly, I feel!!

[Peter G]

Enjoy: http://www.redstate.com/sections/featured-story/

[Peter G]

Sorry for sullying your site with that link PM but this is getting ever so much fun to watch.

[AnneJ]

Thanks, Peter G. I noticed that he used the word "by" when he was supposed to use "buy". That kind of stuff drives me nuts, but if they don't care about the truth, why should sloppy spelling be an issue?