Just Keep Pluggin' Away

Repubs lost big last month, but you wouldn't know it by their behavior lately.  Right now, they're concentrating on The Fiscal "Cliff" - which I'm sure you already know is really more of a gentle incline, but hey, we need something to angst about so let's pump up the high school fuck-around drama to maintain some level of interest.  If We The People aren't tuned in on the issues, then the politicians have to admit the thing's a bit of a scam.  But if we "really know what's going on", then we'd be able to see for ourselves what a scam it is, and that's even worse.  So Politicians and Press Poodles come up with ways of framing the issues and reporting the proceedings that keep voters lined up in support of one side or the other.  Red Pols need to point at their numbers to make their claims of "the American people are with us..." and the Blue Pols do basically the same from their side.  The big difference here is that the Red Pol Supporters are almost always on board with bullshit - Climate Change is a hoax; Eric Holder is confiscating guns; tax cut equals tax revenue increase; democracy is threatened because too many people are voting; etc.  Repubs haven't stopped promoting all that crap because The Big Lie works, and we're seeing it in action.

I guess we should expect more of the same as the fight for party control in the GOP continues.

The problem, of course is that we'll be presented various choices from the menu of "very serious GOP intellectuals" who have to carry several tons of Tea Party baggage (which they won't be allowed to offload any time soon), and who'll have to pretend all that dead weight is actually a good thing because it represents good old American Values blah blah blah - which means they'll either never get out of The Bubble, or by the time they're allowed to talk about what they really wanna do, we'll know they don't really know what the fuck they're talking about anyway.  Reality can really harsh your mellow.

Enjoy a little Krugman right now:

As Jonathan Chait points out, Bobby Jindal — who is supposed to be one of the intellectual leaders of his party — has just published an op-ed on the cliff that sure looks as if he has no idea whatsoever what the cliff is about. There’s nothing in that piece even hinting that the looming problem is spending cuts and tax increases that will shrink the deficit too soon; and his big policy ideas would actually make the lurch to austerity worse. It’s not just the idea of a balanced budget amendment, which would force harsh austerity every time the economy goes into recession; putting a cap on spending as share of GDP would do the same, because you’d have to cut spending whenever GDP went down.