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It appears the Republicans ARE the problem after all...
From Alternet-
Today's GOP: Worst Political Party Since the Civil War
The last time things got this bad was about 150 years ago -- and we needed a Civil War to resolve it.
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein recently wrote a column for the Washington Post with a provocative headline: “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.” Their thesis was that they had never, in 40 years of observing Congress, seen the institution behave in such a dysfunctional manner. They wrote that while they had long found reasons to be critical of both Democrats and Republicans, things have changed and our current crisis is solely the fault of a Republican Party that "has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
The article went on to present extensive evidence to back their case. Nothing has signified these extreme tendencies more clearly than last summer's debt ceiling fiasco, where the Republicans acted so irresponsibly that Standard & Poor's felt compelled to downgrade America's hitherto gold-plated credit rating. In their press release, the ratings agency implicitly accused the Republicans of "brinksmanship" and said they had caused American governance and policymaking to become "less stable, less effective, and less predictable that we previously believed." They were particularly alarmed that the statutory debt ceiling had become a bargaining chip over fiscal policy.
Looking back at that debacle, Steve Benen recently wrote, "It was, to my mind, the worst thing an American major party has done, at least in domestic politics, since the Civil War."
The last time things got this bad was about 150 years ago -- and we needed a Civil War to resolve it.
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein recently wrote a column for the Washington Post with a provocative headline: “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.” Their thesis was that they had never, in 40 years of observing Congress, seen the institution behave in such a dysfunctional manner. They wrote that while they had long found reasons to be critical of both Democrats and Republicans, things have changed and our current crisis is solely the fault of a Republican Party that "has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
The article went on to present extensive evidence to back their case. Nothing has signified these extreme tendencies more clearly than last summer's debt ceiling fiasco, where the Republicans acted so irresponsibly that Standard & Poor's felt compelled to downgrade America's hitherto gold-plated credit rating. In their press release, the ratings agency implicitly accused the Republicans of "brinksmanship" and said they had caused American governance and policymaking to become "less stable, less effective, and less predictable that we previously believed." They were particularly alarmed that the statutory debt ceiling had become a bargaining chip over fiscal policy.
Looking back at that debacle, Steve Benen recently wrote, "It was, to my mind, the worst thing an American major party has done, at least in domestic politics, since the Civil War."
Is the MSM finally growing a spine and declaring the sky to be blue?
(For the record, I once worked in an office with this Republican chick who insisted the sky was not, in fact, blue- proving that Republicans are capable of grasping science when it serves their purpose of hair-splitting for the sake of being difficult)
