politics: Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

This is a scathingly accurate dissection of the current Republican war on America, the pervasive corrosion of shallow 'a pox on both their houses!' thinking among media elites & 'swing' voters and the general ineffectiveness and futility of the Democrats in confronting this political reality.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

I have an unpleasant feeling that like one of the denialist meth addicts on Intervention the US will have to hit absolute rock bottom before anything changes.