How Did This Happen to the GOP?

[phantom power]

I recommend reading the whole thing.

The thing is, it’s not just the RNC that has no authority. For years now, we’ve seen that even Speaker of the House John Boehner has no juice. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can’t do a thing with that august body. No one cares what Reince Priebus has to say. Jeb can’t scare away Mike Huckabee, let alone Lindsey Graham.

It’s just a vortex of stupid that is devouring everything in its path. The architects of this vortex are as varied as Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales and Regent University jurisprudence, neoconservative foreign policy, the mighty right-wing media wurlitzer, the campaign finance laws, the lack of any accountability for anything ever, the things defending torture does to the human spirit and the brain, the folks who will pay any price to keep science from interfering with their bottom line, what happens when you have to lower your standards to make Ed Meese and Sarah Palin acceptable…

There are so many architects. Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed and Bill Kristol and Lee Atwater and fucking Donald Segretti if you want to get down to it.

This is what happens when virtually every malevolent force in the country is allowed to pursue their path in an uncoordinated way, chipping, chipping, chipping away at the institutions of the country and the decency of everyday folks.

It doesn’t end in the glorious victory of the Conservative Revolution. It ends in chaos and confusion.

One of our two allowed political parties is defunct and yet somehow controls Congress and most of the states.

Almost unbelievably and despite their remarkable electoral successes, they need to be fired just like Michael Steele…before they really win something.

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2015/6/12/03059/4717

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Sounds like this:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats, The Second Coming

[valerief]

2. Well, isn't the U.S. solution always to wage a WAR against enemies?

Time for a WAR on Congress.

Oh, I forgot. The way it plays out in the U.S. is you SAY you want, for example, a WAR on Drugs but what you REALLY want is a WAR FOR Drugs. It would play out the same with a WAR on Congress.

[Iliyah]

3. K & R

But this makes the GOP more dangerous to what is left of America's democracy.

America for the highest bidder, ie, Koch's, et al.

[Martin Eden]

4. "It ends in chaos and confusion."

Epitaph by King Crimson, 1969

The wall on which the prophets wrote
Is cracking at the seams
Upon the instruments of death
The sunlight brightly gleams
When every man is torn apart
With nightmares and with dreams,
Will no one lay the laurel wreath
When silence drowns the screams

Between the iron gates of fate,
The seeds of time were sown,
And watered by the deeds of those
Who know and who are known;
Knowledge is a deadly friend
When no one sets the rules
The fate of all mankind I see
Is in the hands of fools

Confusion will be my epitaph
As I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it we can all sit back and laugh,
But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying,
Yes I fear tomorrow I'll be crying