Here is Steve Kornacki reporting for Salon on the Republican Party kowtowing to the radical fringe of political nihilists, namely the Tea Party, who do not believe in any concept of governance, but believe and practice the concept of permanent insurgency. Here are the old Wall Street Republican hacks finding common cause with their newest brethren, whose commitment to the dismantling of the last vestiges of the New Deal is now beyond question. Creating a crisis where there was none has been a propaganda coup, to use plain language. But the fomentation of political hysteria is a proud Republican tradition, now being used in its most extreme form. Is the extreme intransigence of the Republican Party simply a cynical political maneuver to push the President to take the radical step of invoking the 14th amendment?(Is the Republican leadership even capable of this kind of ‘political vision’?) Imagine the political climate after the President invoked the 14th: it would be the perfect rhetorical frame for the campaign of 2012. Obama, The Dictator, the Constitutional usurper, a perfect book end to Obama, The Socialist. Also one can see very clearly that this whole debate about the evils of deficit spending is a way to foreclose any form of policy predicated on any form of Neo-Keynesian economics, even though we are mired in a severe economic depression. We can also see that the notion of austerity is the newest intellectual and political plaything of the ‘Free Marketeers’ who managed to drive the economy into the ground in 2008. Austerity is the call to all but the Wall Street elite, whose profits are at all time highs, while the ordinary citizen is mired in the reality of loss, devaluation and long term unemployment.
Almost Marx
