A Divine Comedy It Ain’t

In another post I said that by pandering to the lunatic right the Republicans were dancing with the devil. Now the dance has turned into a predictable farce. Needless to say that the comedy is something a good deal less than divine. The Republicans who habitually demonstrate their intellectual bankruptcy by touting Newt Gingrich as their idea of an intellectual are now yelling at him. I guess he is demonstrating that he is not a very good dancer. He stepped in it so deep that he is now picking shit out of his nose. He defended the individual mandate in the affordable health care law then tried to retract his statement. Did I say that? I did certainly did not mean it. How could you have possibly thought I meant it? Because you said it, dumb ass. The Newtster also saw that Ryan’s plan to replace Medicare with a voucher program while giving outrageous tax breaks to the rich was wildly unpopular. Even the factually challenged independents are able to see that this scheme would hose them. Although I do not give Gingrich credit for being very bright, I must admit that he was able to see that a Presidential candidate has to back away from the Ryan plan. So Gingrich called the plan radical. He is now paying the price for doing so and is in full back pedal mode.

The right wing is obviously going to hang Ryan’s stinking albatross around the neck of whoever wins the Republican primary. We Democrats are trying not to laugh as we sing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” But we cannot get too giddy about this because the Republican Party’s dance with the devil puts the entire country in a very dangerous situation. In an earlier post, I pointed out that the Republicans had to raise the debt ceiling because their masters, Wall Street and the large corporations, will lose billions of dollars if they do not do this. For all his posturing about not raising the debt ceiling if taxes are raised on rich or deep cuts are not made to entitlement programs Mr. Boehner is realistic enough to know that the debt ceiling must be raised. Unfortunately for him, he made the mistake of publicly demonstrating his grasp of reality by saying the debt ceiling would have to be raised now and probably again next year. In doing this he, like Gingrich, stepped in it. The right wing is all over him.

When you dance with the devil he will not settle for a kiss good night. The only question is when the devil will exact his price and how many people will have to pay. If this country is lucky, Mr. Boehner will form a temporary coalition with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling. If this country is really lucky the Republicans will also pay the price for dancing with the devil in two thousand and twelve and again in the mid-term elections. That should be enough to make the Republican Party cut loose the right wing idiots and start acting responsibly again. Whether this will happen depends to a great extent on whether the independent voters will wake up enough to see who is hosing them and get angry enough to do something about it.