Wongblog Re Latest Republican Theory - "Is the Republican Party Obama’s fault?"
Ezra Klien quotes several conservative pundits who without a hint of irony complain that by acting reasonable, President Obama has forced Republicans to be unreasonable. For example, by saying that debt limit must be raised, Republicans are forced to oppose Obama and threaten default. Likewise, by pushing for fairly modest gun controls, President Obama is painting Republicans into a corner by forcing them to demand that teachers be armed. 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/18/is-the-republican-party-obamas-fault/
The logic here is weirdly impeccable. The Republican Party’s dilemma is that House Republicans keeps taking all kinds of unreasonable and unpopular positions. If Obama weren’t president, the House Republicans wouldn’t be taking so many unreasonable and unpopular positions. But since Obama is president, and since he does need to work with House Republicans, he is highlighting their unreasonable and unpopular opinions in a bid to make them change their minds, which is making House Republicans look even worse. And so it’s ultimately Obama’s fault that House Republicans are, say, threatening to breach the debt ceiling if they don’t get their way on spending cuts. After all, if Mitt Romney had won the election, the debt ceiling wouldn’t even be a question!
My colleague Michael Gerson wrote one of the earliest versions of this column. As he put it, Obama “knows that Republicans are forced by the momentum of their ideology to take positions on spending that he can easily demagogue.” So he has, in a bid to “break his opponents,” decided to “force the GOP to surrender on the debt limit, with nothing in return” and to “require Republicans to accept new taxes in exchange for any real spending reductions.”
So the White House’s plan, then, is to force Republicans to be unreasonable by being reasonable and taking the positions Obama has espoused all along, including in the 2012 campaign. Gerson argues that this is a devious win-win for the president: “If [Republicans] agree, their caucus is fractured (again). And if they refuse (which they are likely to do), Obama can paint them as obstructionists and extremists who are willing to destroy the economy/the nation’s credit rating/the military for their own ideological purposes.”
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So White House officials’ devious plan to destroy the Republican Party, in Brooks’s view, is that they will propose more moderate, popular policies than they did in their first term, thus making Republicans look terrible when they vote against everything.
= new reply since forum marked as read
"Personally, I look forward to the GOP's final, shuddering spasm and dancing on its grave. The party did it to itself. It catered, nay groveled, to the lowest, basest elements in American politics and, lo and behold, it got exactly what it wanted. Every whacked-out racist and bigot in the country flocked to its welcoming banner! This is what they wanted to be. Now they're going to have to suffer the consequences of ingesting deadly poison. As for David Brooks, it's remarkably sweet of him to publish the recipe for the final coups de grace that should put the GOP into its ultimate death throes. I think the President and the Democrats had already figured out what needs to be done, but it's always helpful to have such a nice memory-jogger! Farewell, Goopers! It's been miserable knowing you!"
This post certainly speaks for ME!
I want to see the republi-CON party as we know it shrivel up and die. I truly do. As long as there are knuckledraggers calling the shots and bringing their 6th-Century mindsets into power to impose those Neanderthal views on all the rest of us who recognize that we're all living in the 21st Century, then we will have utterly childish, spoiled-snotnose behavior coming out of them - like a bunch of bratty, ill-behaved five-year-olds who've never been taught to mind or to share or to be socialized in any way. In order to fix the ungodly mess they've created over the last several decades, I think we're gonna have to get them OUT OF THE WAY for awhile. We'll certainly need another couple of Democratic terms in the White House to continue the repairs effectively. The Supreme Court has to be salvaged and modified from its current reactionary majority. MANY laws have to be re-enacted or revised or replaced or reintroduced to correct things - on a national, federal level - so that ALL 50 STATES conform to such things as gun rules and health-care rules - so you can't have self-serving stingey-ness in one state fucking the residents of the next state over, or have people massacred in New York by guns you can get over the back fence in South Carolina or some such place. Or where you can't find a Planned Parenthood clinic FOR ANY REASON, not just family-planning services, without having to cross state lines hundreds of miles from where you live. Stuff like that.
There's a profoundly and frightfully large repair job that has to be undertaken. MUST be undertaken. And it will only be accomplished to the maximum effectiveness if the naysayers and filibusterers and teabaggers and other nut-jobs who resolutely and relentlessly stand in the way - are cleared away first. Only THEN should we encourage what's left of the GOP to start suiting up and getting back in the game. And ONLY the rare few adults in the room.
Remember, the bad guys have been working toward THIS result (whether they realized it or not) for at least 30 years. Ever since ronald reagan started gaining momentum. But that's only counting from the start of his presidency in 1981, although he actually started building upon his reckless, short-sighted wrecking-crew philosophy in the 60s here in California. 
That's a LONG time to be allowed to do undeterred and unopposed damage, and to allow that damage to sink in and take root. THIS, NOW, is when the fruits of those labors have been manifested and harvested. So we have an UNGODLY clean-up job to do. I want as many of them OUT OF THE WAY AS POSSIBLE while we do it. The ship of state HAS TO BE towed off the sand bar and righted. And OUR definition of "right." NOT THEIRS!!!!!! They've done such a thorough job ruining the nation and the mindsets of too many of its citizens that we even have to rehabilitate the very word "right." They've remade it - so that it doesn't even mean "right" anymore!!!! "Right," in their hands, means utterly and tragically WRONG!
I want them the hell OUT OF THE WAY, defanged and declawed and permanently hobbled. Sent to their rooms and locked in. Solidly and securely SIDE-LINED until we're finished cleaning up the mess they made. And then only the reasonable ones who aren't blinded by their ayn rand ideology should be allowed out. When, and ONLY when they've learned their lesson and are ready to join the 21st Century and play nice. Hell, if we're all LUCKY, it won't be the 22nd Century before they finally see (and own up to) the error of their ways. Otherwise they're gonna be like a bunch of lance armstrongs, still arrogant, still secure in what he sees as his own somehow-moral justification for what he did and how he lied, and having not learned a single thing.