"He uses his folly like a stalking horse"

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned.  ~Henry Wallace


I love the articles from the Guardian about American politics.

One can only guess what John Boehner's strategy has been during the past week over the payroll tax cuts. But it looks like he employed the "full bowel technique" with equal success. His Tea Party caucus kept stuffing him with rhetorical bran muffins so that every time he went to a microphone he was full of it. 

Poor muffins. I feel sorry for them. It can't be easy being forced into the service of Tea Party nonsense.

Adrenalin could keep the Tea Party going only so long outside the fetid ecosystem of Fox News, talk radio and the internet, before reality intervened and forced some kind of reckoning.

It continues to amaze me how obvious the reality of Fox News and talk radio is to the rest of the world, and how strenuously Tea Partiers and most Repubicans continue to deny it, clinging to their noxious little Roger Ailes bubble.

I don't agree with everything this writer says--he doesn't understand the depth and depravity of Republican hostage-taking, for example, especially over the debt ceiling. See here for an excellent analysis of how the President beat the Republicans at their own game.

The article's got the Tea Party Republicans nailed, however.

The Tea Party keeps thrashing around for someone, anyone, in whom they can invest their zeal and who the rest of their party (never mind the rest of the country) can live with. They've pretty much been through the pack and just when you think they've hit bottom they plumb new depths. It turns out there is no one who both makes sense to the Tea Party and the rest of the world, let alone their fellow Republicans. These are the people who have been dictating the pace and shape of economic reform for the last year. These are the birthers who believe in death panels, hate government intrusion unless it involves a woman's uterus and love wars and tax cuts but hate budget deficits. 

Hopefully they'll thrash themselves right out of Washington.

In the meantime, we desperately need a press who will tell the truth about what's happening, no matter the howls and whines from Republicans about "liberal bias." Facts are facts, and if they lean towards liberals, so be it. That's called reality. But if the American press won't provide this, it's good to know that there's someone in the world who will.