Your modern Republican Party....

I understand that my pleas to "No both sides are not the same!", often fall on deaf ears. It is the received conventional that the system is irrevocably broken due to both parties. Even if that is not the case, and demonstrably so, it fits the narrative better.

This piece over at Truth Out by, recently retired, longtime republican staffer Mike Lofgren is jarring.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

It is a long piece, but it very much deserves a read. Republicans the lunatics are running the asylum! I actively support a coherent Republican party. Even if I disagree with them, they form a necessary corrective. What we have today is not that. These are individuals who do not accept even the basic premise of government. They believe in some mythical past, devoid of wrongs and injustice. They ignore or vilify anyone who disagrees with them.

That is no recipe for a functional democracy.

-Cheers