"The Cruzification of the GOP"

On this lovely autumn Sunday morning, as our neighborhood readies itself for the annual Columbus Day parade (passing right by my home here in historic Boston's North End), I offer some sobering thoughts on the recklessness of the GOP, not by a liberal, but by one of their own.  

I'll also note that the apocalyptic TeaPublicans are so far gone that not one of them will bother to read Douthat, since anyone who is critical of them is considered part of the "enemedia," or as that unfortunate woman from Alaska loves to call it, "the lamestream media."

When 70% of the country is against what they've done and what they're doing, it is their habit to hunker down and become more obstinate and blind to their kamikaze tactics.



Conservative New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, on the Crazy TeaPublicans:



"They told me," Martin Sheen's Willard says to Marlon Brando's Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now," at the end of a long journey up the river, "that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound."

His baldness bathed in gold, his body pooled in shadow, Kurtz murmurs: "Are my methods unsound?" 

And Willard — filthy, hollow-eyed, stunned by what he’s seen — replies:

"I don't see any method at all, sir."

This is basically how reasonable people should feel about the recent conduct of the House Republicans.

[skip]


"...we shouldn't overstate the gravity of what’s been happening in Washington. There are many policies in American history, pursued in good faith by liberals or conservatives, that have been more damaging to the country than the Republican decision to shut down the government this month, and many gambits that have reaped bigger political disasters than most House Republicans are likely to face as a result.

But there is still something well-nigh-unprecedented about how Republicans have conducted themselves of late. It’s not the scale of their mistake, or the kind of damage that it’s caused, but the fact that their strategy was such self-evident folly, so transparently devoid of any method whatsoever."


And this from Dana Milbank:


Skeptics warned from the start that it was a suicide mission for Republicans to shut down the federal government in a long-shot attempt to defund Obamacare. Now that such dire predictions have come to pass, the lawmakers who engineered the shutdown are getting the conflagration — and the martyrdom — they sought. 

 Call it the Cruzifiction of the GOP.



And finally, another one of their own, Jennifer Rubin, illustrates their bat-shyte craziness, which the bat-shyte crazies will also ignore (it's what they do best--ignore reality and march off the cliff in lock step):


RUBIN:  There has been, to put it mildly, some mass self-delusion going on in right-wing circles. Here’s how to tell if you are suffering from the ill-effects of the echo chamber: 

1. You think Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) has it nailed when he tells the Value Voters Summit that the Dems are “feeling the heat” in the shutdown fight. 

2. You think the problem is Ken Cuccinelli isn’t conservative enough. 

3. You think if only the shutdown went on longer the GOP would win this fight.

cartoon by John Branch