It's not just them -- it's us, too

If you follow politics and opinions on it, and you share the basic feeling that the Republicans in Congress are screwing up the basic principles of democratic government as well as the necessary propriety required to make Congress and the national government work...

you're not alone.   I've felt this for a long time.  The roots of the problem are the Tea Party, which is rooted in an unreasoning anger against living in a country headed by a black Democrat, who had to take unique financial steps to get us out of the worst economic downturn this country has experienced.   And the cause of that was unregulated banking, which was spurred by Republican legislation and Republican leadership.    As I've said before, if you're aren't sure who's fault it is for stupid governmental actions, blame the Republicans.  If you are sure, then it's obviously the Republicans who did it.

Add to that the screedy diatribes of Rush Limbaugh, the even more bizarre and outlandish commentary of even more archly crazily conservative commentators like Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Mark Steyn (among a low-IQ cast of 100s), and the herd mentality of the far right that sucks up every word like it is the milk of God -- and we have a bad brew.

Now, you may or may not have heard about the recent NY Times op-ed of David Brooks.  It was entitled "The Republican's Incompetence Caucus".   Wonderful stuff, and dead-on.  I've extracted my favorite passages and appended them below;  but the whole thing is wonderfully accurate about the woefulness and wild-wooliness of the Freedom Caucusites and their ilk.

Here we go.

The Republican Party’s capacity for effective self-governance degraded slowly, over the course of a long chain of rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals.

Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced.

But this new Republican faction regards the messy business of politics as soiled and impure. Compromise is corruption. Inconvenient facts [and truths -- ow] are ignored. Countrymen with different views are regarded as aliens.

This anti-political political ethos produced elected leaders of jaw-dropping incompetence.

Rich, isn't it? Let's finish with the near-conclusion:

Really, have we ever seen bumbling on this scale, people at once so cynical and so naïve, so willfully ignorant in using levers of power to produce some tangible if incremental good?

But wait, there's more.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the major threat to the American economy, and one reason for slow growth, is what the Republicans have been doing -- and what they are threatening to do again over the debt ceiling and a comprehensive government funding bill, spurred on by illegitimate Planned Parenthood secret camera trap videos.

GOP a threat to U.S. Economy, Say Economists

(I'd like to read the whole article directly from the WSJ, but I'd have to pay for it.  I'll spend my money elsewhere.)

The above article says, quoting the WSJ article:

After watching Congress repeatedly crash into fiscal deadlines in recent years, a majority of economists are expecting a repeat performance, with 55 percent of respondents to the latest Wall Street Journal survey of 62 economists--not all of whom answered every question--predicting at least some disruption to the economy and financial markets in the months ahead.

And then it adds its own follow-up comment:

And that potential disruption could have a real impact on their forecast for 2.2 percent GDP growth and a 5.1 percent unemployment rate by the end of 2015. As the chart above shows, three-quarters of the respondents said the debt ceiling crisis of 2011, the fiscal cliff showdown to start 2013, and the GOP shutdown that fall produced mild or significant damage to the American economy.

So we can decry what they're doing and despair over what might happen because they're doing it, but unless they stop doing it, they're going to hurt the very country that they supposedly profess to admire with patriotic fervor, and they will damage the citizenry of this country with their futile ideological quixotic quests.

So it's not just what they're doing, which as Brooks notes is basically bumbling incompetence and ignorance (which I may add is augmented by the hubris that they are convinced they're doing the right thing (God's work) and they will not be convinced that any other course of action is possible) -- the tangible result of what they are doing is hurting you, me, and every other citizen of this country, from the very rich to the very poor.

And that really, really is detestable.