The National Shame That Is The GOP

UPDATE BELOW:

Norm Ornstein, a congressional expert and scholar at the conserative American Enterprise Institute, criticized GOP leaders' efforts to 'sabotage' Obamacare as 'sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials.'

In a National Journal colum titled, 'The Unprecedented—and Contemptible—Attempts to Sabotage Obamacare,' Ornstein said the GOP anti-Obamacare effort is 'spinning out of control' and 'simply unprecedented.' 

 He noted that after President Bush enacted the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003, Democrats worked with Republicans to improve it and help seniors rather than attempting to tarnish it for political gain. 

 Even when Democrats opposed the Iraq war, he said, 'they did not try to sabotage the surge' because "[t]o do so would have been close to treasonous.'

 Ornstein concludes: But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. 

One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one's breath away."

Ornstein is correct.  The Republicans have stopped being part of the governing body that proposes, enacts, and implements the laws of this country.  They have become a party of saboteurs, willing to create chaos, confusion, and misery to get their way, which way has nothing to do with compromise and governing.   

The GOP is no longer a political party.  It is a collection of malevolent ideologues, very much, IMO, like the anti-abolitionists of the 1850s who stopped at nothing, even murder, in order to preserve their slavery way of life.  A little more than 160 years ago, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was beaten nearly to death for delivering a radical speech against slavery and no one stopped the beastly South Carolina Senator from delivering the blows.

Although the present-day political parties have not sunk to that--yet, the unyielding obstructionism and sabotage by the GOP is having the same deleterious affects on the country. 

As the GOP continues in its intransigence that is the greater cause of the slow recovery from the economic disasters that started under the last GOP president, remember which party is the one acting as spiteful, vengeful saboteurs.


UPDATE from Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate, Economics:


"Leading Republicans appear to be nerving themselves up for another round of attempted fiscal blackmail. With the end of the fiscal year looming, they aren’t offering the kinds of compromises that might produce a deal and avoid a government shutdown; instead, they’re drafting extremist legislation — bills that would, for example, cut clean-water grants by 83 percent — that has no chance of becoming law. Furthermore, they’re threatening, once again, to block any rise in the debt ceiling, a move that would damage the U.S. economy and possibly provoke a world financial crisis.

Yet even as Republican politicians seem ready to go on the offensive, there’s a palpable sense of anxiety, even despair, among conservative pundits and analysts. Better-informed people on the right seem, finally, to be facing up to a horrible truth: Health care reform, President Obama’s signature policy achievement, is probably going to work. 

 And the good news about Obamacare is, I’d argue, what’s driving the Republican Party’s intensified extremism. Successful health reform wouldn’t just be a victory for a president conservatives loathe, it would be an object demonstration of the falseness of right-wing ideology. So Republicans are being driven into a last, desperate effort to head this thing off at the pass."