Do Nothings and Know Nothings
If you worked at a place where barely one in 10 people approved of what you did, if you took a six-figure salary for a job that let you go on “recess” for about 29 weeks of the year, and if you were addressed as “honorable” for said employment, you might suffer an occasional bout of shame. Or you could fight back. How else to explain a proposal in the 112th Congress — that is, the one known as worst, ever — to ban the word “lunatic” from federal law.
Sure, the honorable gentlemen behind the measure say they want to reduce the stigma of mental illness. But they may also be trying to shield themselves from a public that has their number. The House run by John Boehner is stuffed with zealots and intellectual dead-enders who think compromise is a synonym for treason. Americans agree on very little, but there seems to be shore-to-shore consensus on a view of this Congress: We hate you.
Not, of course, individually, as about 85 percent of the current members can expect to glide to reelection without ever having to explain why they will not govern. But, as an institution, this Congress is very, very sick.
So it is encouraging to see two longtime Washington wise men — Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, sensible, nonpartisan scholars and impeccably credentialed authors of good advice that no one ever follows — come out with a full-blown polemic against the Republicans who have steered Congress off a cliff...
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/do-nothings-and-know-nothings/
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