GOP takes spending bill negotiating cues from Alex Jones and WorldNetDaily

[DonViejo]

Congress is broken in part because many of its members listen to, and believe, crazy people

ALEX PAREENE

Because congressional Republicans don’t want to shut down the government again, they have spent the last few weeks negotiating a spending bill to keep the government funded for around a year. The appropriations committees released the details of their plan this week. It is, obviously, mostly terrible, reflecting the priorities of a Republican House and a Senate where Republicans still have a great deal of power to block almost anything they like.

Naturally, the Washington Post’s “The Fix” blog turned the bill into an easily digestible list of “winners and losers.” This is because for many legislators and politicians and members of the political media, legislating, like everything else in “politics,” is a game. I don’t mean that they don’t take it seriously — they all take it very seriously — they just take the “game” part of it — the “winning and losing” — seriously, rather than the “how will this affect actual people” part.

But the list is actually a useful analysis of how Congress works, if you read it correctly. Because while some of the items listed are big deals with hefty price tags, much of it is made up of expenses that amount to rounding errors in the federal government budget. And those minor items were the things that many Republicans cared the most about, because they reflect issues highlighted on talk radio and right-wing blogs. It’s not just that Republicans betray their supposed preference for less spending whenever the beneficiary of government spending is an industry they support (see: forcing the TSA to hire more private security contractors) — that’s normal political hypocrisy. It’s that for Republicans, some of the most important items, the things they were most determined to “win” in negotiations, were talk radio bugaboos representing a minuscule fraction of government spending. This spending bill took a long time to negotiate not just because the two sides have fundamentally different philosophies of government, but because they live in entirely different realities.

And that’s why the IRS is now banned from making bad viral videos!

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http://www.salon.com/2014/01/15/gop_takes_spending_bill_negotiating_cues_from_alex_jones_and_worldnetdaily/