The Tea Party is winning

This whole fiscal cliff drama ignores the central fact of what it entails;  despite abysmally low public opinion ratings (except in the reddest red counties of the Red states);  despite dragging down perfectly good Republican candidates that might actually be able to do something good for the country; despite standing up for family values gun rights even after the massacre in Connecticut;  despite promoting anti-science political positions as if they were virtuous; despite contributing directly to the deregulatory environment that caused the recession, anti-environmental stances that poison the fetuses they purport to protect, defense of the wealthiest from paying any more of their share to maintain the basic functions of a civilized NATION;  despite the dismissal, denunciation, and disaster of their chosen son candidates in the most recent election;  despite all that,

the Tea Party is winning.
How?  By being so intransigent, insane, and incontrovertible that That Which Seemed Unthinkable is Now Happening.

Oh, I know I'm not the first to say it.  And there are negotiations going on that might blunt some of the tax increases which would be a drag on the economy.  And I expect that the sequestration will get significantly reduced. 

But we're not sure yet.  And I think the low-IQ Tea Party representatives want it this way,  like it this way, and don't want to change it.  Partly because of where they're from (read the article) and partly because they aren't convinced that anything, yes, anything that government does is worthwhile.  Which makes one wonder why they are even in the government, but that's a question for another day.

But look at how we got into this miasmic muddle of a mess in the first place.

In 2010, many Tea Party zealots got elected after demonizing the Obama administration's health care plan, which was conceived and implemented partly to reduce our increasing health care costs, which are making the national deficit go higher and higher!  But did that prevent the Tea Party from making a big socialist deal out of it?  No. 

Once in office, then they held the country's faith and credit hostage over ridiculous demands to tie the debt ceiling to deficit reduction (through ONLY spending cuts).  That led to a national credit downgrade (which means our borrowing costs go up, which INCREASES the DEFICIT), and to a bad deal in which a supercommittee would come up with a plan to reduce the deficit, or if they didn't, really BIG, really BAD, UNTHINKABLY RANDOM budget cuts would take place.

Everybody knew that wouldn't happen, because some of the biggest cuts would fall on the Department of Defense, and everybody knows that Republicans are big on defense, big budget projects that keep the home citizens employed, and national defense is supposedly one of the few things that Tea Partiers agree the national government should do, because it says so directly in the Con-sti-two-shun. 

But then the Tea Party, waggling the lips of their robot John Boehner and their marionette Eric Cantor (note that they have their hands up the asses of both of these clowns to manipulate them), said that the supercommittee could not consider, propound, or suggest a realistic plan for deficit reduction over a decade that included increased revenues (also called 'taxes').

So, no plan.  Then the election, in which the Tea Party forced Mitt Romney to swing so far to the right that he amazingly couldn't flop back to the middle (despite his best efforts to do so), and an election that delightfully showed what empty brains and empty suits the true Tea Party candidates really were.

So, Obama won.  But the Tea Party core did too, at least most of them in the safe ruddy red gerrymandered districts.  And they didn't acknowledge that Obama had won because the majority of the electorate had repudiated both their candidates and their positions. Poll after poll after poll after poll shows that Americans in the committee of the whole, meaning us, want a solution that works, and one that includes higher revenues,
most of it from people that consider a Mercedes Benz minivan the family car.

So they didn't give.  And they even shot the seat out from under Speaker Boneless, by not giving him his Plan B. 

This is what they want, actually.  They want the sequester.  They want a big f*cking slice out of the government, no matter how many people on the lower rungs get kicked off the ladder into the mud, no matter if you have to wait a year to get a passport processed by the one remaining employee who knows how to do anything at the State Department, no matter if another interstate bridge collapses due to inadequate inspections and postponed repairs and kills another 50 people or so.

That's because they don't CARE.  They are beholden, like cultic apostles, to an inflexible belief system.  They will serve that system unthinkingly, no matter what the cost it incurs on real people that just want a government that manages to do something, let alone inspire us to higher aspirations.

So no matter what happens to the fiscal cliff and the sequester and the next round of debt ceiling hostage taking, by getting us this far, and by making the Speaker dance to their tune and Mitch McConnell sing their praises, remember - the worse it gets, the more that the Tea Party wins.  And also remember, the worse it gets;  credit  downgrade, recession, higher unemployment, lapses in national security, more brutal massacres of children and firefighters with assault weapons, less mental health treatments for those that need it, more hungry kids, more teen mothers who can't get abortions --  that's how the Tea Party wants it.  Even if they say they don't.

And in case you think I'm wrong about this, just look at how Sam Brownback is  screwing up Kansas.

http://www.kansascity.com/2012/12/29/3986555/first-in-a-series-brownback-says.html