I’ve been watching the epic train wreck that is the modern Republican Party with a mixture of gob-smacked surprise and growing fear. The Party seems bound and determined to become the modern equivalent of the Whigs. It is fast becoming defined not by what it stands for, but what it stands against.
Is this the last and inevitable step of the process set up by the Sainted Don Reynaldo? Has what began as an anti-government philosophy finally degenerated into a general rejection of the Post Modern era and everything it stands for?
I can’t seem to make any sense of the Republican Parties will toward self-destruction. In what parallel universe is it good political strategy to infuriate 50% of the electorate? I ask because that is what the Elephants have been doing for the last two weeks.
I kind of get this, in a marginal way. The Republicans have been so successful for so long doubling down on the stupid that is has become a reflex. So when Obama split the baby for the Catholic Bishops on Birth Control coverage, it became axiomatic that the Republicans would not put down the cudgel of “religious liberty”
What I did not expect is that the Republicans would begin to use that cudgel to bash in their own heads. For almost two weeks the Elephants have been indulging themselves in a very disturbing bit of performance art, where they demonstrate why they should not be trusted to run a small boy scout troop, never mind the hyperpower of the United States of America.
The all out assault on the entire cohort of Vagina-bearing Americans has been a thing of terror to behold. It has been quite a he-man women haters club for the Party Of Lincoln. It got so bad that Olympia Snowe, Republican economic troglodyte / big business zombie in good standing, finally baled out of the Republican Party. This is a woman who probably has little elephants printed on her intimate attire walking out because even she can’t take the toxic levels of testosterone coursing through the GOP. That Olympia Snowe, Calvin Coolidge in a skirt, could no longer tolerate the boy’s only club the Republican Party has become speaks volumes about how bad its gotten.
The breaking point was most likely the Blunt Amendment. That this pointless, foolish, badly thought out, badly written, ultra-reactionary diatribe even saw the light of day is an insult to any woman who is not tied to stove by some whack-a-loon renegade Mormon living the plural marriage dream in the middle of the Nevada desert.
The Blunt Amendment zooms right by plain misogyny and rockets onward to the reinstatement of serfdom; and not just for women. It make every working man and women who works for a living a subservient peon to the whims of his or her employee. It strips the agency of salaried worker and reduces him or her to the level of a five year old who’s purchasing decisions can be vetoed by big daddy.
That the Blunt Amendment failed on a Party line vote shows how badly the Republican Party has lurched into the new feudalism of the right. It shows how the “Liberty” that the right talks about is the liberty of Ultra-Wealthy white males to crush the 99.9% of Americans who are not part of that exclusive club.
Much of this is the bitter tail end of the identity politics that made the Nixon / Reagan Republican Party so dominant from the seventies onward. The Republicans really lashed themselves to the mast of White Male Evangelical and Blue Collar resentment. For most of fifty years, the Reagan meme of government being the problem; of government taking money from good hard working working white men and giving it to the undeserving has been pure political gold.
But the problem with the politics of fear and resentment is that you got to keep raising the ante. Thus by the time Pappy Bush came up for reelection the specter of Bill Clinton the Republicans presented was fairly hair raising. By the time the Big Dog had gotten reelected the Elephants were ready to vomit blood, which they did; only the act was called an “impeachment.”
Which brings us to the attempted reelection of Barack Obama. I have no idea of how the Democrats managed it, but they managed to nominate, then elect every Heartland, Fly-Over State, Republican’s worst nightmare: an urban, urbane, black man as President. Overnight a depressed, divided, demoralized GOP found a unifying principle; make Obama a one term president.
But a funny thing happened on the way to putting a wrecking ball to Barack Obama: Mitt Romney. With no excitement being generated by the March To Mitt, it looks like Republicans are going to the social issues. But as the Elephants have mined the “hey have you noticed the President is black” political vein to exhaustion,and the Gay Marriage freak out is on life support; what’s a social conservative to do?
The answer, such as it is, was to freak out on sex. Specifically it was to freak out on female sexual agency. The specific freak out was on contraception, and how the mean, nasty, Christ-hating, Obama was going to force the Catholic Bishops to provide birth control to employees. But I’m still a little confused what the Republicans were driving at. There was this weird discussion about a little bit of Republican kink that involved a woman holding an aspirin between her legs; some people’s notions of foreplay are a bit odd.
Still the whole clown-car about how Bayer can make a woman a moral actor was much more informative than the Republicans intended it to be. It shone a light on a seriously warped understanding of how not only female sexuality works, but also a warped understanding how human sexuality works outside the missionary position.
I have no idea when the Republicans lost the memo, but in the spirit of true bi-partisanship I will reissue it to them, if they care to read it: sex is pleasurable, and human beings are into pleasure. Even good Christian women have sex for reasons other than procreation. I know, shocking. But for reasons that can only be explained by an ideological adherence to some very toxic and very rigid religious beliefs, plus a whole lot of free-floating misogyny; the Republicans have decided to dump the 99% of women who use birth control into the whore part of the Chaste / Whore dichotomy. Well, at least they are being consistent in their support of the 1%.
Maybe the Republicans wanted, in their own very strange way, to honor Valentine’s Day, and the month of love. God knows they have no use for the other part of February--Black History Month. Still forcing Virginia women to undergo vaginal probes if they dare to get abortions, medical rape by any other name, is odd Valentine to give the women of the state. Equally odd was the all male panel the Republican Congress served up on Birth Control. Plus there was that odd bit where the Republican controlled Congressional Committee declined to hear the testimony of one women on the subject and then slagged another women via Rush Limbaugh for impudence to testify for her right to control her fertility. The Committee had no problem with hearing the musings of a panel of reactionary, women-hating, males though.
The Republicans keep going to this well, and they keep getting their heads handed to them by the blow-back. But this is just the rights obsessions getting the better of them. There is so little that truly unites the right these days. The movement is intellectually exhausted, emotionally fragile, and bitterly divided. Only their hates unite the fragmented right. They hate Obama. They hate Women. They Hate Romney. In that order it seems.
But what happens after 2012? If Obama is reelected, he can only last as an organizing principle to 2014. Mitt will be forced into political Siberia if 2012 ends up goose eggs at the top slot. That only leaves women-hating and the fear of the brown menace to shore up the GOP. Outside the South that spells almost immediate collapse. Even in the South, there is only so long that the Republican Party can avoid the demographic wrecking ball. Piss off enough women, and all the skullduggery the Republicans have done to lock out competition in the South will come to naught; and fairly quickly.
While the US has had a political duopoly ever since Washington’s Farewell Address, the parties occupying those two slots have changed. Both the Whig and Federalist Parties have gone the way of the Trilobite, extinct. There is no particular reason why the Republican Party can’t join them. And if the Republican Party keeps disrespecting female voters the way it has been for the last two weeks, it could end up on the ash heap of history a lot sooner than anyone would expect.
Cujo359 is spot on about Bush being contemptuous of the role of government. What he did not point out is the ideology that provided cover for W's refusal to do any heavy lifting after invading Iraq. Bush and his cronies really bought into the Libertarian notion that the Market was the solution to everything.
God knows why Conservatives have so bought into the idea that private enterprise has the answer to everything. Thom Hartmann has some ideas about this, but it is still passing strange how the ideology that Hartmann outlines can be accepted as Gospel by thinking human beings. Even the most cursory glance at history shows that you can not have any kind of market, never mind a free one, without government providing some sort of base.
Be that as it may, the Libertarian propeller-heads that manned up the Iraq Occupation Authority were all gung ho to prove the notion that the market would solve all issues of governance in Iraq. A Iraq socialist society and economy was thrown to wolves by incompetents chosen solely for their fealty to Republican Party notions of governance.
Not surprisingly, with no one minding the store, corruption and graft became the order of the day. The vultures swooped in and began picking the place clean. Out-right theft was the order of the day, as Palets of hard currency were handed over without as much as a proper receipt. Bush could ignore the bad news, not only because that was his default, but also because he could always fallback on an ideological excuse. No need to intervene, the Market will sort this out, government intervention will only make things worse. Stay the course; it will all work out.
You can see the mindset of a no government intervention, the Libertarian mindset, even prior to the invasion. Rumsfeld rejected any kind of due diligence or planning for the Iraqi Occupation. Iraq was to be the great Libertarian proof that market driven government, laissez faire ideology on steroids, is best. Iraq was to be the shining beacon on the hill, Gault on earth, where all would bend their knee to the Sainted Ayn Rand, high priestess of Objectivism. It turned out to be a mess.
With all the mental energy going into the Randian project of Iraq, Afghanistan was abandoned to the fates. Bush and Cheney only bothered with Afghanistan because they had to. It was the prerequisite to their jolly little war in Iraq. Iraq got the troopers, and the one thousand support staff for the US Embassy; Afghanistan got Tora Bora.
Bush thoroughly screwed the pooch. It was gross negligence backed up by an ideology that "proved" that gross negligence was the best policy option available. This was the state of affairs when Obama took the helm of the Ship Of State. Here too is where I depart from Cujo359, which is weird, because I am ending up an even harsher critic of Hope On A Rope than Cujo359. This is not exactly and easy thing to do.
Be that as it may, I do have nothing but contempt for Obama's performance as regards to both Iraq and Afghanistan. How can a man with such an obvious intelligence as Barack has, slip into the group think that infests the fetid political swamps of the Potomac, is beyond me. How can you come out of Harvard and become so clueless? Or is that the whole point of Harvard, to inculcate a man or woman in to the mysteries of the Conventional Wisdom, and thus make that person just another mindless Pod Person in good standing with the political class?
If the goal of Harvard is to turn bright men and women into unthinking zombies wedded to the conventional wisdom, well, mission accomplished as far as Barack Obama is concerned. The man lacks an original thought in his head. An entire Winter spent contemplating options in the Graveyard of Empires, just to make the same kind of decision Incurious George would make in two seconds flat; change you can believe in boys and girls!
Obama followed the script laid down to him by grand consensus of the DC elite without even bothering to change an i or a t. He ignored the military as much as he could, without sparking an out-right mutiny, and he ignored the facts on the ground as best as he could as well. He kicked the can down the road to avoid the political repercussions of what really needed to be done: fish or cut bait.
The situation on the ground in Afghanistan was exactly what one would suspect after nearly four years of neglect and low priorities: an utter disaster. The Talaban were back bigger, badder than ever. The government of Hamid Karzai was a corrupt, disheveled, incompetent non-starter. The US troopers where burnt out from multiple deployments, and utterly cynical about the mission. The Afghan police and army were a disorganized, unprofessional collection of louts and layabouts, a menace more than a help to the civilians. In short, the best policy for Afghanistan was to walk to the exits as quickly as decorum would allow. But that would be toxic politics, and Obama is nothing if not a political animal.
Obama doubled down with his own Bushite Surge. True to form, the Surge, not really woking in Iraq, did not work at all in Afghanistan. It was a net loss all around; except to the Taliban, who had a gay old time running circles around the Coalition military.
That Obama did not see this coming, or that he pretended not to see it, are two equally hideous possibilities. Obama's failures frustrate me much more than Bush's. Bush was a man-child, a dry drunk with a mean streak, one can understand, if not approve, his lack of compassion for everyone caught in the meat grinder of Afghanistan. But Obama was supposed to be the smarter one, the intellectual, the cool, rational leader. Obama was supposed to occupy the higher intellectual and moral space. Instead, he carried on, continued the pointless war in Afghanistan. Obama even attempted to renegotiate the withdrawal from Iraq. After the epic mess Bush made, there was no way on God's good green earth that the Iraqi's were going to extend the SOFA with the US. Incredibly, Obama was even more foolhardy than Bush, who saw the writing on the wall and caved to the Iraqis.
To me, Obama is the prime example of what is wrong with our political class. He is a prime example of the intellectual and moral rot; of how the Establishment has corrupted and degenerated. With no real check on its enthusiasms, the political elite had become intellectually and morally flabby. The All Volunteer Military has released them to attempt all manner of hare-brained interventionist schemes. Because so few US citizens have any skin in the game of power politics, there is no accountability. If the troopers in Iraq and Afghanistan were draftees, the Bush and Obama Administrations would have been much more circumspect about how they went about their policies. You sure would not see the multiple deployments, and the traumatic brain injuries that are the signature outcomes of our two wars of choice. You might not have even seen a unthinking rush to war with Iraq if the Draft was in place. But there is no draft, so our clueless, incompetent, unthinking political class gets to charge off into any number of misadventures and then leave the bill for later generations to pay. Yes, war is always a costly and dirty business, but our political elites have found a way to make it even uglier, nastier, more brutal, and more pointless than it needs be.