The Politics Blog

Friendless and alone, the Minority Leader of the Senaye wanders a cold, abandoned road. At the last minute, he helped broker a deal that saved the United States government from a deliberate act of fiscal arson. In the immediate aftermath, he was praised -- even by liberals -- for his sensibility and for putting country ahead of his own political prospects. Now, though, he has a well-financed challenger on his right in a primary, and a well-regarded challenger (a bit) to his left in the general election, and the flying monkeys are descending on him from as far away as the lower Arctic.

(Note: I do not believe that Princess Dumbass Of The Northwoods is going to do anything except holler into her Facebook macheen because anything else would require work, and we know how she feels about that as a concept.)

What's a fella to do anyway, he thinks, as he hears a faint rustling in the underbrush and the call of distant predatory birds. What's a fella to do?

The easy thing to do is to conclude that McConnell reckoned that the threat to him in the general election is greater than the one presented by the monkeyhouse, so he decided to become a big enough RINO squish to keep the economy alive. But, right now, he's the most interesting galoot in legislative politics. He's got to maintain his status as a big RINO squish for the rest of the year. He's somehow got to deploy the whole arsenal of institutional scorn and good-ol-boyz disregard to marginalize the likes of Tailgunner Ted Cruz. He's also got to stay true to the essential Republican truth that this whole brawl has been about tactics and not about the fundamental ideas that led the party over the cliff in the first place. He's not going to see the light on stimulus spending or using the tax code to try and do something about income inequality. He's going to mean the same thing when he says "entitlement reform" now that he did a year ago. He's just not going to burn down the house in order to get what he wants.

Frankly, I don't care what happens to him. McConnell is as guilty as anyone of using the Power Of Teh Krazee to increased the political power of his party. If it rounds upon him now, that's a kind of rough justice. But, more than anyone else, he painted a bulls-eye on himself this week. He will have a most interesting future.

The late afternoon of 28 September 1990 is etched indelibly in my mind, or perhaps in my stomach. That was the day that I just about lost it, alternately laughing and crying in fifteen-second bursts. I was kneeling, facing outward into the desert in my assigned position at the Objective Rally Point, as the rain came down and with it the last shred of my dignity washed away. How I came to that point takes a small bit of explaining.

The United States Army's Ranger School is the process by which young men are pushed to the very edge of their endurance in order to simulate the stresses of actual combat. Technically it is a leadership course, but sometimes that gets lost in the haze. Particularly when you are kept awake more than 22 hours a day, fed minimally, and spend all day doing combat training missions in a variety of environments.

We, the sad-sacks of Ranger Class 10-90 (If you go to the graduation photos that's me, top row, second from the left) were especially lucky because that year the Ranger School experimented with having four phases and environments for training. The "City" phase was at Fort Benning, Georgia, the "Mountain" phase was up on the Tennessee Valley Divide near Dahlonaga, Georgia, the "Swamp" phase was at Eglin AFB in the panhandle of Florida, and the final "Desert" phase was on the salt flats of Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. Yea us. Instead of the normal 8-weeks of exhaustion and starvation, we got an extra two weeks added on...

In which I despair, not of the rebranding, but of The Great Chastening.

There's a third reason not to stop fighting. Forget the consultants, the pundits and the pollsters; good policy is good politics. If the Republicans had not fought on ObamaCare, the compromise would have been over the budget sequester. Instead, they have retained the sequester and for the past three months ObamaCare and its failings have been front and center in the national debate. Its disastrous launch was spotlighted by our defund struggle, not overshadowed, as some contend. With a revived and engaged electorate, ObamaCare will now be the issue for the next few years.

The fever has not broken. The delusion of revolution survives.

The redoubtable Digby hipped me to this glorious reservoir of wingnuttia. A window into The Great Chastening.

Yeah, that'll happen.

Luxuriate, my minions.

My senior senator sent me an e-mail the other day. She was not entirely interested in moving on just yet.

But I want to be clear: I am NOT celebrating tonight. Yes, we prevented an economic catastrophe that would have put a huge hole in our fragile economic recovery. But the reason we were in this mess in the first place is that a reckless faction in Congress took the government and the economy hostage for no good purpose and to no productive end. According to the S&P; index, the government shutdown had delivered a powerful blow to the U.S. economy. By their estimates, $24 billion has been flushed down the drain for a completely unnecessary political stunt. $24 billion dollars. How many children could have been back in Head Start classes? How many seniors could have had a hot lunch through Meals on Wheels? How many scientists could have gotten their research funded? How many bridges could have been repaired and trains upgraded? The Republicans keep saying, "Leave the sequester in place and cut all those budgets." They keep trying to cut funding for the things that would help us build a future. But they are ready to flush away $24 billion on a political stunt. So I'm relieved, but I'm also pretty angry. We have serious problems that need to be fixed, and we have hard choices to make about taxes and spending. I hope we never see our country flush money away like this again. Not ever.

There is a way to put the boot on the throat without seeming to be putting your boot on the throat. This is one way.

This is another. 

Reid also said that he would make sure to protect Social Security against attempts to trade cuts for sequestration relief, calling such a bargain "a stupid trade." "That's no trade. We are going to affect entitlements so we can increase defense spending? Don't check me for a vote there. I'm not interested in that," he said. "It is the most successful social program in the history of the world. The program is not about to go broke, so take it easy on Social Security," Reid said.

Some people in the White House are on notice, too.

"What kind iv a game is goluf?" asked Mr. Hennessy. "Why do they call it rile an' ancient?" "I don't know," said Mr. Dooley, "onless it is because th' prisidint iv th' United States has just took it up."

-- Finley Peter Dunne, 1899.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.

-- James Madison, Federalist 10, November 22, 1787.   

Why is it that I think, when the president was decrying the effect of professional activists who profit from conflict, he probably wasn't talking about these eternal grifters? Does nobody listen to the blog's First Law Of Economics any more?

Fix the Debt, the organization that took flight last year from the very deep pockets of octagenarian Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson, held an afternoon event at the National Press Club to remind everyone that, crisis averted, the real problem in this country remained our crushing long-term debt. You might think that the fiasco of the past few weeks would have prompted some soul-searching within the organization - after all, its well-broadcast doomsday warnings of a nation drowning in red ink have only helped to feed conservative Republican fury about out of control spending, even as budget deficits steadily decline and the long-term fiscal picture brightens. It is that fury that, as much as anything, drove the brinksmanship over the government shutdown and debt ceiling, but Fix the Debt officials spoke as if they have had no role in bringing us to this point - as if, to the contrary, we arrived at this point precisely because we were not listening to them.

I love this part...