Ok so I'm tooling around the vastness of the cyber-world, reading bits and pieces from the right, left, center and a few, well, all I can say are not from this planet (they can't be or at least they are not members of humanity). It's the totally clueless I want to focus on here, those that don't understand that the government debacle we are currently witnessing was
intelligently designed with one goal in mind, and the "needs" of the people, is not it.
- This is not just about Obamacare anymore. ~ Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y.
Oh, please do enlighten us as to why you have "slimmed down" the government?
- We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I
don’t know what that even is. ~ Rep. Marlin
Stutzman, R-Ind
You don't know what that "even" is?? WTF! Might want to look into how your party is attempting to dismantle the government.
Scratch that,,,
Damn, I was off to a good start, when I ran across this gem of insight,
How Congress reached this point from Steve Benen of "The Maddow Blog;" he say it so much better than I possibly could:
This is critically important to understanding what's happening on Capitol Hill right now. If the House and Senate had gone to a conference committee back in the spring to work out their budget differences, Republicans would have been expected to compromise to reach a broader agreement -- but Republicans don't want to compromise.
So they decided to abandon the budget process they themselves had asked for so they could do precisely what they're doing now -- use extortion instead of compromise to try to get what they want.
The government may shut down in 15 hours, but it's not an accident. Indeed, it could have been easily avoided if Congress had just done what Congresses are supposed to do when the House and Senate disagree on the budget. But Republicans insisted on this confrontation, hoping that if they just threatened enough harm, maybe Democrats would put aside the election results and meet some or all of the GOP's demands.
As Benen points out, this started back in
May (I actually believe it started long before that, 40 years ago with Nixon's Southern Strategy among others, but that may be another post) the debacle didn't just appear over night. By all appearances it's not going to end any time soon, referring to what
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) offered Democrats.
Collins, along with GOP Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) and Lisa Murkowski
(Alaska), worked with Democrats to draw up a 23-page draft that would
have ended the shutdown and funded federal agencies for six months at
current spending levels. It would have left intact the sequestration
cuts scheduled to hit Jan. 15 but would have given agency officials
flexibility to decide where the reductions should occur.
In
addition, the proposal would raise the debt limit through Jan. 31,
setting up a path for the two sides to have broad budget talks to try to
tackle the issues of taxes and entitlement reform.
In exchange,
Republicans sought tweaks to Obama’s Affordable Care Act, including a
two-year delay of a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices that is unpopular
in both parties.
Ignoring for the moment that it
was a one-sided deal, there is another problem (child), even if Senate Democrats took Collins’ deal, it wouldn’t have made a difference since House Republicans said they’d refuse to even bring the bill to the floor. And why’s that? Because House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is thinking ahead.
The leaders, however, began the meeting trying to prepare their
troops for the likelihood that they would have to adopt a deal cut in
the Senate. Both leaders explained that the White House is no longer
willing to negotiate with the House, that McConnell and Reid were
talking, and that a bipartisan agreement is likely to emerge that will
need the House’s approval.
But instead of absorbing this painful
reality, some rank-and-file Republicans grew visibly excited about the
prospect of opposing such a deal, said one person in the room. This
defiance was fed by Ryan, who stood up and railed against the Collins
proposal, saying the House could not accept either a debt-limit bill or a
government-funding measure that would delay the next fight until the
new year.
According to two Republicans familiar with the exchange,
Ryan argued that the House would need those deadlines as “leverage” for
delaying the health-care law’s individual mandate and adding a
“conscience clause” — allowing employers and insurers to opt out of
birth-control coverage if they find it objectionable on moral or
religious grounds — and mentioned tax and entitlement goals Ryan had
focused on in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
So let me get this straight. Paul Ryan, the man who believes rape is a form of conception, is pre-planning another crises at which point he’ll demand restrictions on access to contraception? Wake up people!! This is what happens when religious dogma becomes a
political ideology:
The willingness of Republicans to take the debt ceiling and the federal
budget hostage in order to try to extract concessions from Democrats is
probably the most lasting gift that the Tea Party has granted the
country. More reasonable Republican politicians fear being primaried by
Tea Party candidates. A handful of wide-eyed fanatics in Congress have
hijacked the party. The Tea Party base and the hard right politicians
driving this entire thing seem oblivious to the consequences. It’s no
wonder, since so many of them—particularly those in leadership—are
fundamentalist Christians whose religions have distorted their worldview
until they cannot actually see what they’re doing and what kind of
damage it would cause.
[,,,]
Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that it’s easy for Christian
conservatives to worry more about imaginary threats from Obamacare than
it is for them to worry about the very real threat to worldwide economic
stability if the go along with their harebrained scheme of forcing the
government into default. To make it worse, many have convinced
themselves that it’s their opponents who are deluded.
IMHO what people are failing to see is the underlying mechanism that is driving the Reich - control; and control is the mainstay of Dominionism. Hence the deep seated need and repeated efforts to control women (the consciousness clause and numerous attempts to ban abortion).
Chris Hedges sums it up quite well:
The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the
ideology of the Christian right. The movement uses religion to sanctify
military and heroic “virtues,” glorify blind obedience and order over
reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective
emotions. Feminism and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered
the American male physically and spiritually impotent,,,
Dominionists believe they are engaged in an epic battle against the
forces of Satan. They live in a binary world of black and white. They
feel they are victims, surrounded by sinister groups bent on their
destruction. They have anointed themselves as agents of God who alone
know God’s will. They sanctify their rage. This rage lies at the center
of the ideology,,,
Think about it people, this debacle has nothing to do with money. In the minds of the Reich, it never was about money. It is about "
a world dominated by Christianity. Not just under the control of Christianity but completely and utterly
dominated by it. According to Dominionists, every aspect of our lives is subject to the strictures of the Bible. Our personal lives and social lives must
be lived in accordance with the word of God. Economics, politics,
science, the arts and the law are all to be placed under the auspices of
Christianity."
All ideological, theological and political debates with the radical
Christian right are useless. It cares nothing for rational thought and
discussion. Its adherents are using the space within the open society to
destroy the open society itself. Our naive attempts to placate a
movement bent on our destruction, to prove to it that we too have
“values,” only strengthen its supposed legitimacy and increase our own
weakness ~ Chris Hedges
