The Beast is in Charge of the GOP
by Steven D
Fri Jul 15th, 2011 at 12:17:49 PM EST
James Egan asks some fair questions about the folks who seemingly want a debt default rather than accept the more than generous proposals on the table from President Obama, and they are:
Who would put at risk, at a time when most people are hurting from a gasping economy, the monthly issuance of life-supporting funds for wounded veterans, disabled children, countless elderly couples living on barely $2,000 a month — all told, over 70 million checks that go out each month?
Who would risk pushing the livelihoods of businesses small and big off a cliff by an interest rate spike, possibly igniting a second recession as the credit-rating agencies have just suggested — essentially saying “blow your brains out, America,” as Warren Buffett phrased it?
Who would risk this anarchists’ storm, rather than a pass a formality: extending the borrowing authority of the United States so the country can pay bills from the past?
The answer is
the anarchist wing of the Republican Party, or as I will name them later in this diary, The Beast. What? You've never heard of them? Well they go by another name in the media, having something to do with tea parties. What is more, they feel little if any loyalty to the incumbent republicans who hold all the leadership posts in the House and Senate.
Egan, in his NYT online op-ed from yesterday,
divides the Republican party into two groups. One he calls the anarchist wing: these are the people who coalesced around the "Tea Party" banner.It's a disparate group but at its heart is one simple core principle: Destroy the Federal Government. And by destroy I mean destroy. They want the Federal government to die, except perhaps for the military.
snip//
Then we have those Republicans Egan identifies as the "Tasseled Loafer" faction. They love the federal government so long as they control it and can use it to benefit themselves and their friends, large mega-corporations who want government contracts or favors. Sure they want to grind the middle class into dust, but the last thing they want is a federal government drowned in a bathtub. They would much prefer to see federal dollars lavished on private corporations, whether handing your FICA taxes to Wall Street and the Health Insurance companies or your income taxes to defense contractors.
They had a great gig when Dubya was in office. They have no principled objection to a large federal government so long as they can control it for their financial benefit and the benefit of their incorporeal "friends" the large corporations upon which the Supreme Court has bestowed personhood. Egan identifies Mitch McConnell as a symbolic representative of this faction of the Republican party, but I'm sure you could name a dozen or more Republicans in the Senate and House who fit that definition off the top of your head.
more...
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2011/7/15/121749/971
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