The Reign of Morons

Charles Pierce:

We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.

I ran against our idiot state representative in 2006 because I couldn't stand that the Republican party was turning into an organization run by the dumbest part of the group.  I didn't really say a whole lot to get out the message, because I quickly learned that a lot of people I like and generally respect bought into the nonsense. 

I've worked really hard in conversations with people since then to explain that because of the Bush tax cuts (and various state tax cuts), very rich people are paying much less in taxes than they used to, and that folks with lots of unearned income pay much less overall in taxes than most folks with earned income.  What I've come to realize is that most folks are too busy in their daily lives to be able to keep up on the numerous ways people at the top of the heap buffalo them with simplistic talking points to convince them that Republicans are working in their interests.

Not only that, but the loss of good-paying factory jobs, and the increase of service jobs has left the difference between the incomes the lower middle class (say, people making enough income they don't qualify for the earned-income tax credit), the working poor (people with jobs who qualify for the earned-income tax credit) and the unemployed poor (people who's income comes solely from government support), which leaves the first two groups extremely resentful of the third group.  They will support politicians who tell them that the third group is the cause of most of the deficit, when a significant portion comes from the tax cuts and wars, along with Medicare.  But they aren't the only people voting for those guys.  A large number of business people who should be able to see through the bullshit also buy in.  Of those politicians who sell that bullshit, the worst of the worst are the true believers, the ones who have turned trickle-down economics and hatred of the poor into quasi-religious beliefs to be combined with their religious fundamentalism.  Those are the idiot caucus, and they are at fault in this mess. They need cut out of our government like the malignancy they are.  While folks like John Boehner tell the same tall tales as the idiot caucus, they are willing to listen to the semi-sane and realize they can't just burn down the government.  Unfortunately, in their lust for power, Boehner and his ilk have handed over the reins to the idiot caucus and the craziest part of the base.