gigantes wrote:(Re-posting and linking this here. I thought the reply was pretty fascinating.)
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"Meh. All Republican congressmen are idiots."
This is a dangerous attitude. They may do idiotic things, and certainly some of them are absolutely anti-science loons, but every single thing the GOP does is in service of the overriding goal of regulatory capture. And there is a lot of brainpower behind all of this.
They don't -want- to fix anything. They want to break our government so that the GOP can point to the shambles and yell "See? It needs to be drowned in the bathtub, like St. Grover Norquist says!" and then attempt to hand the whole shebang over to their billionaire master/donors as private enterprise.
Regulatory capture is the goal. That's the true endgame. But they need to break democracy to do that.
They do that in a million little ways, by a thousand cuts, and it's a plan that's not only backed by billions of dollars from American oligarchs, but is orchestrated and anchored by hundreds of think tanks. It's an ideology of pure greed that is propped up by shady organizations like the Federalist Society (to train up hyperconservative/extreme libertarian justices), REDMAP (to gerrymander everything), and ALEC (to allow corporations and lobbyists to directly write bills that benefit the wealthiest members of the corporate world).
What's going on with Walker and in several state legislatures is about breaking democracy. The GOP-manufactured deadlock over a ridiculous wall we don't need and subsequent shutdown are more ways to pretend that democracy doesn't work while in actuality it is simply being subverted by the bad actors in the GOP.
https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/aadcmn/scott_walkers_parting_gift_a_corporate_welfare/ecrit77/
Bingo. A lot of them are far from stupid. They're also traitors who have no problem violating their oaths of office.
Only a fool would think that for a second that Mitch McConnell is even remotely stupid. He's calculating, manipulative, and shrewd. He knows exactly what he's doing by ramming through unqualified circuit court judges and trash like Brett Kavanaugh to the SCOTUS. The GOP and their benefactors want judges who will make judgments in a partisan manner instead of upholding the rule of law.
For the last 38 years, there have been 4 Republican presidents and all four of them presided over GOP efforts to destroy the economy. GOP leadership always leaves the country in bad shape. Clinton left office with a surplus, Bush II nearly drove us into The Great Depression Part 2. Obama fixed Bush's mess and Trump is hell bent on actually destroying the economy (and he has admitted as much in the past because he knows if he drives the economy into the tank, wealthy investors can swoop in and buy up everything for cheap while everyone else suffers).
Why do you think GOP leadership is perfectly content with Trump driving this country off of a cliff economically? it suits their purposes. They know that tax cuts for the wealthy will drive up the deficit. They know that tariffs harm the economy. They don't care. They'll burn the house to the ground and then when they lose power they'll blame the Democrats for everything and the rednecks and idiot baby boomers will fall for the bait and vote them back in again. And this is the problem in itself, the behavior of the voting public that enables all of this crap.
If their voter base woke up and stopped propping them up they wouldn't have any power to do what they are doing. Look at the poorest states in the union. They're all perpetual red states who keep voting in Republicans into state, local and federal positions. That is not a coincidence, that is by design. But the rubes keep voting them in because the GOP panders to their base level instincts of racism, fear, and ignorance while robbing them all blind in the process. In turn they'll continue to disrupt, obstruct, and destroy democratic institutions.
Just wait until they attempt to start to disrupt the peaceful transition of power at the federal level. They're doing it piecemeal at the state level right now. What happens if Trump is shielded from impeachment up until 2020, he loses, claims the election was rigged, and refuses to leave office?