A little over a week left before the August 2nd deadline to reach a deal and the Tea Party and Grover Norquist still have a stranglehold on Republicans in Congress.
Debt-reduction negotiations between President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner collapsed Friday, derailing an effort to reach a landmark agreement to cut spending, overhaul the tax code and avert a government default.
In subsequent statements, both sides blamed the other for an impasse that threatens to plunge the nation into a fiscal crisis if the government fails to meet a looming deadline to raise the federal debt ceiling.
Barack Obama offered Republicans a deal which was slanted further to the right than anything a Ronald Reagan could have imagined in his wildest dreams. And John Boehner said no. Boehner walked away from a deal which had over $1 trillion in cuts in domestic and defense spending as well as $650 billion in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Make no mistake about it, Republicans have broken government. Their refusal to compromise even when presented with a proposal which could easily have been written by the most staunch of conservatives a few years back, is a grim reminder of their ultimate goal – take down this president at any cost. Republicans have made the conscience decision to sacrifice the economic welfare of their country in pursuit of that goal.
Coming from abroad, this country seems as if it is beyond dysfunctional. It looks like a banana republic on the verge of economic collapse. Now that Nixon’s dream has come true and the GOP is fundamentally the party of the Confederacy, it was perhaps naive to think they could ever accept the legitimacy of this president, or treat him with respect or act as adults in the governing process.
But this is who they are. I longed for Obama to bridge this gulf in ideology. But he cannot bridge it alone, especially when the GOP is determined to burn the bridge entirely, even when presented with a deal so tilted to the right only true fanatics could possibly walk away from it. And so the very republic is being plunged into crisis and possible depression by a single, implacable, fanatical faction. Until they are defeated, the country remains in more peril than we know.
In a perfect world, the consequences of Republican’s indefensible actions would be isolated to the fools who empower the madmen at the voting booth – the Ailes’ zombies who have turned over all responsibility to reason for themselves to a right-wing lying, noise machine they pay allegiance to. The actions of a few has put into jeopardy the economic welfare of the U.S. and, in large measure, an entire world.
In this imperfect world, a minority of lunatics have taken over the asylum.
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