I've been wondering why the Repubs are trying to spin a Senate vote into a trap, and why they seem so hell-bent on letting the Dems paint them as the Medicare Villains all while seeming to think of themselves as the heroes who saved entitlement programs by destroying them, because of course, the true zealot holds himself superior to reality blah blah blah.
I'm seriously getting the feeling they're stuck in a kind of ideology whirlpool. They're so determined to "out-conservative" each other, that it takes on an inertia that leads to critical mass and then implosion/explosion. Maybe I'm just thinking of tornadoes or floods or disasters in general because that's in the news lately, but sometimes these random connections are valid. So against the backdrop of things that happen in understandable progressions, I'm also thinking of the mindset that ideologues eventually get into when the more radical of their ideas are proposed (or even adopted as policy), and are then rejected or ignored by "the masses" when it becomes clear those ideas weren't really all that great to begin with.
Watch this installment from The Power of Nightmares, and listen for the part about what happens when Ayman al-Zawahri comes to the conclusion that it's not just the infidels who are to blame, but that his fellow Muslims have failed to keep faith (at about 9:00). These guys never stop to consider that they might have it just a teensy bit wrong - they always assume their followers are betraying their principles; and they always end up rationalizing the absolute need to punish their followers for those failures.
The parallels with what's happening in the GOP are rife and obvious to me. And no, I'm NOT saying the Repubs are just like al-Qaeda. I'm saying that once you've thrown in with fundamentalists of any kind, you're joining a race to the logical extreme.
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