Tag: Shutdown

I want to begin with a simple quote, a letter from Abraham Lincoln, facing a very similar constellation of forces as president Obama does with today’s nullification party, and sounding remarkably like his 2008 successor from Illinois:

What is our present condition? We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum.

This is the challenge today. Not to out-last these vandals, but to vanquish them. To vanquish them to end this preposterous excuse for a political party, to expose their lack of any constructive alternatives for the challenges we face, to indelibly mark them as vandals of the very constitution they dare to celebrate, and as saboteurs of this constitutional democracy. We have a chance now to show the kind of scorching sunlight on these creatures of ideological certainty and personal hubris that they scurry back to the dark holes from which they have recently emerged and be consigned to the moral margins their rancid racism finds most congenial.

To wit: their callousness; their transparent racism; their assault on reason; their contempt for democracy; and their inversion of conservative virtues.

Today was a traffic stunner with our top post being “The Nullification Party” and the second “What Kind Of World Do These People Live In?”

Oh, and Tina Fey is a genius; and Aaron Paul makes me want to cry.

See you in the morning, if the Republicans allow it.

(Photograph: A U.S. Park Police officer stands guard at the Lincoln Memorial, October 1, 2013 in Washington, DC. The National Mall and all monuments and large sections of the government will close due to government shut down after Congress failed to agree on spending. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images.)

Saletan registers the change in rhetoric:

This is a political fight, and it will end when the GOP decides to cut its losses. Speaking from the Rose Garden today, Obama signaled that he’s ready to bring the pain … [Obama repeatedly called] the standoff a “Republican shutdown.” That’s language he has never used before. His slam at “what the Republican Party stands for these days” was his broadest indictment of the GOP ever. He’s escalating the pressure on the entire party in a big way.

Waldman observes that the people gathered around Obama had pre-existing conditions and can now get insurance thanks to Obamacare:

Presidents (and other politicians) use the stories of ordinary people to illustrate political points all the time. What’s a little different here is that Obama is presenting these ordinary people as victims of his political opponents. He’s pointing to them and saying, Republicans are trying to hurt Jane here. They’re trying to stop her from getting insurance. It happens to be true. Is it going to be persuasive? It just might be.

In list form.

Ryan Kearney finds little mention of it in the right-wing press:

[T]he shutdown barely registers on the nation’s top conservative websites. The Weekly Standard is leading with a story about first lady Michelle Obama’s apparently insidious campaign to get Americans to drink more water, The National Review has a piece about how Obama’s agenda is “Transforming America,” and although The Daily Caller’s lead story, “Shutdown Party for Big Democrats,” claims to be on topic, it’s actually about a fundraiser Hillary Clinton hosted Monday night for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. It seems the editors of these websites have read the polls, too, and would just as soon downplay, or outright ignore, that our government is grinding to a halt—lest the GOP be rightly blamed.

Joshua Keating has begun “a regular feature in which American events are described using the tropes and tone normally employed by the American media to describe events in other countries.” The inaugural dispatch covers the lead-up to the shutdown:

The current rebellion has been led by Sen. Ted Cruz, a young fundamentalist lawmaker from the restive Texas region, known in the past as a hotbed of separatist activity. Activity in the legislature ground to a halt last week for a full day as Cruz insisted on performing a time-honored American demonstration of stamina and self-denial, which involved speaking for 21 hours, quoting liberally from science fiction films and children’s books. The gesture drew wide media attention, though its political purpose was unclear to outsiders.

Better still, in my view, is this classic piece by Henry Fairlie way back in 1980:

“Just as Americans in general do not have the habits of deference, so the conservative in America does not have them either. Ultimately he does not defer even to the country’s institutions. If one of these institutions, such as the Supreme Court, makes decisions he detests, he will defame that institution. He is as ready as is the common man to bypass the institutions he ought to defend.”

The American conservative is being revealed right now as the purest form of political vandalism known in the Western world. It is emphatically not conservative. Conservatives try to reserve constitutional order; today’s Republicans seek to destroy all such restraints and any form of moderation.