E.J. Dionne, Jr.: "We are witnessing the disintegration of tea party Republicanism."

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/blowing_up_the_house_20110720/

Blowing Up the House

Posted on Jul 20, 2011
By E.J. Dionne, Jr.


Media reports are touting the Senate’s Gang of Six and its new budget outline. But the news that explains why the nation is caught in this debt-ceiling fiasco is the gang warfare inside the Republican Party. We are witnessing the disintegration of tea party Republicanism.

snip//

When the hero of Rand’s breakthrough novel, “The Fountainhead,” doesn’t get what he wants, he blows up a building. Rand’s followers see that as gallant. So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that blowing up our government doesn’t seem to be a big deal to some of the new radical individualists in our House of Representatives.

Our country is on the edge. Our capital looks like a lunatic asylum to many of our own citizens and much of the world. We need to act right now to restore certainty by extending the debt ceiling through the end of this Congress.

snip//

Republicans need to decide whether they want to be responsible conservatives or whether they will let the tea party destroy the House that Lincoln Built in a glorious explosion. Such pyrotechnics may look great to some people on the pages of a novel or in a movie, but they’re rather unpleasant when experienced in real life.

[ewagner]

1. No kidding....

"Our capital looks like a lunatic asylum to many of our own citizens and much of the world. "

I can't believe these lunatics got elected....

[rfranklin]

2. The Tea Party was always a phoney "movement"

It is representative of how desperately the mega-wealthy are as the country gets closer to an overwhelmingly Democratic majority. They are using every propaganda ploy, every voter suppression technique, and every legislative trick they can pay for because they will soon face a tsunami that will wash them away.

[LonePirate]

3. I do not think many Teabaggers have read more than a page or two of Rand's works.

Most of them probably have never heard of The Fountainhead. They have simply been fed too much economic and political nonsense and they are too intellectually lazy to investigate the truth or realize they have been hoodwinked.

[coalition_unwilling]

6. They have false class consciousness, in that they mis-perceive

their relationship to the means of production and the exploitive nature of unregulated capitalism. It all flows from that. Most tea-baggers have more in common with undocumented workers and with union members than they have with members of the ruling class. But instilling correct class consciousness in them is the work of at least a generation.

[Name removed]

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[checks-n-balances]

5. If so, they need to do it NOW already

before they destroy all of us, everybody.

These people are IN.SANE.

[DCBob]

7. perhaps, but the problem is they still hold a large block of votes and can hold the House hostage..

until they get their way. The only way out of this is for the Dems and moderate Repubs to agree to join together to muster enough votes without the teabaggers to pass a compromise package.