Well, So Much For the Idea That Obama Is Reponsible for DC Gridlock

One of my pet peeves over the last few years is the bullshit notion that gridlock in Washington DC is the fault of both sides.  These couple of paragraphs from a recent USA Today article totally blow such fuckery out of the water:

When Obama played golf with Boehner a few years ago, he was criticized for only playing with him once. But it turns out that wasn't his fault. Boehner told the Naples group they had a "nice" game but he declined a couple of subsequent invitations in order to avoid irritating his "band of renegades" (his description of some of his fellow Republicans).

The exchange with Obama went like this, according to Boehner: "You think it would be too much trouble if we played golf again?" "Yes, Mr. President, I think it would be." To the audience, he added, "You just can't believe the grief I got."

Steve Benen notes that the President was simply "trying to cultivate a relationship with the then-House leader," but couldn't play golf with him anymore "because House Republicans were outraged."

House Republicans were outraged the Speaker of the House was socializing with America's first Black president. Of course, the former Speaker should have told these assholes to go fuck themselves, but standing up to the Baggers was never one of Boehner's strong suits.

The reason Republicans are intentionally causing gridlock is because it plays into their long-term strategy to destroy government. Sure, it makes them look like worthless pieces of America-hating shit in the short term, but the ultimate effect of what they are doing is that people trust government less and less because they continually see it as ineffective.  And that's just the way the Republicans want it.

Quote Of The Week

"Something has happened over the last 15 years in the American conservative psyche that most journalists and centrist political observers don’t want to admit. Conservatives are locked in an increasingly hostile defensive crouch against reality and demographic trends. Supply-side economics, once unquestioned in its Reagan ascendancy, has been shown to be a failure on multiple levels. President George W. Bush’s signature war in Iraq turned out to be a bungled disaster. Secularism is on the rise, gays can legally get married, and America is fast becoming a minority-majority nation. Climate change and wealth inequality are the two most obvious public policy problems, neither of which has even the pretense of a credible conservative solution. This, combined with the election of the first African-American president, has had a debilitating effect on the conservative psyche, which now sees itself under assault from all directions.

"Conservatives have responded by creating their own alternative reality in which rejection of basic facts and decency in the service of ideology is a badge of merit and tribal loyalty. That has created an environment in which the most popular voices tend to be the most aggressive and outlandish."

- David Atkins at Washington Monthly, disagreeing with some pundits who say that the current clusterfuck in the GOP primary process is the media's fault. 

Atkins blames the GOP base, and he is mostly right on that score. Members of the American Media, however, do bear some responsibility for this mess because they allowed the GOP to go full Bircher without any real reporting on the phenomenon.

As I have stated before, the radicalization of the Republican Party is easily the most under-reported story in the last several years, and the emergence of Donald Trump and Ben Carson as viable candidates for the GOP nomination resulted -- at least in part -- from this under-reporting.

Obama's Favorite Right-Wing Conspiracy

I thought this was pretty funny:

[W]hen Simmons asked the President what he thought was the most entertaining conspiracy theory about himself, it was clear that Obama was having a laugh at the internet rumors surrounding "Jade Helm 15" that riled some southern states, particularly Texas, earlier this year.

"That military exercises we were doing in Texas were designed to begin martial law so that I could usurp the Constitution and stay in power longer," he told Simmons. "Anybody who thinks I could get away with telling Michelle I’m going to be president any longer than eight years does not know my wife."

My favorite Obama conspiracy theory will always be the whole Birther thing, because in order for that conspiracy to have been true, Obama would have had to use time-travel technology to jump back to early-1960s Honolulu to put birth announcements into the newspapers there. 

One GOP congressman tried to get around this problem by suggesting that Obama's family might have sent telegrams from Kenya to Hawaii requesting that operatives there insert fake birth notices in the papers so that little Barack could one day be President of the United States. But if that's the case, they should have picked a more presidential sounding name than Barack Hussein Obama, don't you think?

Quote of the Week

"It would send a signal that we're not the kind of country that I know America is. Even having this conversation sends a powerful signal. They're doing high-fives in the Clinton campaign right now when they hear this. That's the problem with this.”

- Jeb Bush, responding to Donald Trump's statement in last night's debate that the U.S. needs to deport 11.3 million undocumented immigrants and build a massive wall on the Mexican border.

Bye Bye Ben

Dr. Ben Carson's fifteen minutes of fame seem to be coming to an end:

Ben Carson’s campaign on Friday admitted, in a response to an inquiry from POLITICO, that a central point in his inspirational personal story was fabricated: his application and acceptance into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

The academy has occupied a central place in Carson’s tale for years. According to a story told in Carson’s book, “Gifted Hands,” the then-17 year old was introduced in 1969 to Gen. William Westmoreland, who had just ended his command of U.S. forces in Vietnam, and the two dined together. That meeting, according to Carson’s telling, was followed by a “full scholarship” to the military academy.

Carson's campaign appears to be in full meltdown. His statements about his violent youth are also being challenged.  And, as this video indicates, Carson is really overplaying his whole "you can't trust the media" line of attack. He obviously does not like answering tough questions and is clearly scared of the media, but all this lashing out makes him look like a coward.

If Carson can survive this, then he can survive anything.  But lying about being accepted into West Point just might be a bridge too far for even his most diehard supporters.  As Jim Newell at Slate points out:

Fabrications of oft-repeated biographical details are bad, in politics. They’re especially bad when they involve the military. And they’re especially especially bad when it looks like this is something of a pattern for the candidate. What will we find out next?  If you’re Ben Carson right now, you sure wish the media would go back to talking about the pyramids.

You can read all about Carson's pyramid theory here.

Interesting Obamacare Battle Brewing in Kentucky

Republican Matt Bevin won the Kentucky governorship tonight.  There's a chance that Bevin will try to strip 400,000 Kentucky residents of their health insurance by reversing the state's acceptance of Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.

The soft-hearted side of me hopes that he won't do this, because a lot of people would suffer as a result.  But my political side would love to seem him try, because it would be fascinating to watch a state actually try to end coverage -- and thus reject all that federal money -- after insuring so many people.

I don't think that will happen, though.  Bevin will propose changes to the program, the federal government will approve, and then Bevin can claim its not Obamacare anymore (or something like that).