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Rollingstone - "Republican Extremism and the Lessons of History"
This story does an excellent job of highlighting why we will continue to have crisis after crisis so long as you have big money right wing extremists able to dictate and supplant the traditional power brokers within the Republican party. It is not Boehner's fault, because the modern Republican party has evolved into a tool to be manipulated by the propaganda machine that it once thought it controlled.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/republican-extremism-and-the-lessons-of-history-20131010
How has a faction consisting of no more than four dozen House members come to exercise so much destructive power? The continuing abandonment of professional responsibilities by the nation's mainstream news sources – including most of the metropolitan daily newspapers and the television outlets, network and cable – has had a great deal to do with it. At some point over the past 40 years, the bedrock principle of journalistic objectivity became twisted into the craven idea of false equivalency, whereby blatant falsehoods get reported simply as one side of an argument and receive equal weight with the reported argument of the other side. There is no shortage of explanations for the press's abdication: intimidation at the rise of Fox News and other propaganda operations; a deep confusion about the difference between hard-won objectivity and a lazy, counterfeit neutrality; and the poisonous effects of the postmodern axiom that truth, especially in politics, is a relative thing, depending on your perspective in a tweet. Whatever the explanation, today's journalism has trashed the tradition of fearless, factual reporting pioneered by Walter Lippmann, Edward R. Murrow and Anthony Lewis.
A press devoted to searching for and reporting the truth, wherever it might lead, would have kept the public better informed of the basic details of the government shutdown and debt-ceiling showdowns. It also would have reported seriously the hard truths of the Tea Party "insurgency," including how it was largely created and has since been bankrolled by oil-and-gas moguls like David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries, and by a panoply of richly endowed right-wing pressure groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Jim DeMint's Heritage Foundation. It also would have reported on the basic reason for the hard right's growing domination of the Republican Party, which has been the decay of the party at every level, including what passes for its party leadership. No figure exemplifies the problem better than the GOP's highest-ranking official, Speaker John Boehner, whose background and politics have largely escaped scrutiny.
* * *
As a matter of history, Boehner is the most pathetic figure ever to serve as speaker of the House. Questioned last month about why he let right-wing members of his caucus overrule his own crucial – and publicly announced – decision to keep Obamacare out of the budget negotiations, Boehner could only reply that there were many points of view inside the Republican caucus and that "the key to any leadership job is to listen." Henry Clay, who could not only listen but also speak eloquently, would scoff at Boehner's withered definition of leadership. Days into the shutdown, Boehner reportedly told colleagues that he would prevent a default – an uncommon show of firmness. But those reports also raised questions about how long he could command the loyalty of his caucus.
* * *
The current Republican Party is the latest angry exception to the rules of normal consensus-building politics, and it is unlikely that the GOP will function as a normal political party once again anytime soon. The GOP's long rightward march – deeply rooted in the revolt against the New Deal, headed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and accelerated by Newt Gingrich in the 1990s – depends upon the "cannibalism" that Gingrich came to lament; and that cannibalism has devoured, among many things, what had once been the party's strong "moderate" and even "liberal" wings. All that remains as a supposedly tempering force inside the GOP are Republicans so conservative that they cannot really be called tempering, and so inept and on the defensive that they cannot be called a force. If John Boehner is the last man standing against extremism in the party, there is really nothing to bar the door.
A press devoted to searching for and reporting the truth, wherever it might lead, would have kept the public better informed of the basic details of the government shutdown and debt-ceiling showdowns. It also would have reported seriously the hard truths of the Tea Party "insurgency," including how it was largely created and has since been bankrolled by oil-and-gas moguls like David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries, and by a panoply of richly endowed right-wing pressure groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Jim DeMint's Heritage Foundation. It also would have reported on the basic reason for the hard right's growing domination of the Republican Party, which has been the decay of the party at every level, including what passes for its party leadership. No figure exemplifies the problem better than the GOP's highest-ranking official, Speaker John Boehner, whose background and politics have largely escaped scrutiny.
* * *
As a matter of history, Boehner is the most pathetic figure ever to serve as speaker of the House. Questioned last month about why he let right-wing members of his caucus overrule his own crucial – and publicly announced – decision to keep Obamacare out of the budget negotiations, Boehner could only reply that there were many points of view inside the Republican caucus and that "the key to any leadership job is to listen." Henry Clay, who could not only listen but also speak eloquently, would scoff at Boehner's withered definition of leadership. Days into the shutdown, Boehner reportedly told colleagues that he would prevent a default – an uncommon show of firmness. But those reports also raised questions about how long he could command the loyalty of his caucus.
* * *
The current Republican Party is the latest angry exception to the rules of normal consensus-building politics, and it is unlikely that the GOP will function as a normal political party once again anytime soon. The GOP's long rightward march – deeply rooted in the revolt against the New Deal, headed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and accelerated by Newt Gingrich in the 1990s – depends upon the "cannibalism" that Gingrich came to lament; and that cannibalism has devoured, among many things, what had once been the party's strong "moderate" and even "liberal" wings. All that remains as a supposedly tempering force inside the GOP are Republicans so conservative that they cannot really be called tempering, and so inept and on the defensive that they cannot be called a force. If John Boehner is the last man standing against extremism in the party, there is really nothing to bar the door.
