Where Do Republicans Go From Here: Further Down The Toilet Of Tea Party Insanity, Or Back Toward Relative Bipartisan Sanity?

From early this morning the news has been full of confident reports that the idiotic Republican shutdown is about to be put behind us. I won't fully believe it until it's done, but the reports are nearly unanimously confident that Congress will in fact pull its head out of its ass and the chestnuts of the global economy out of the fire.

So. If we're wrapping up the shutdown now -- will the rightwing nutbags be able to do it again? Soon? It seems so stupid to me that so many nonextremist Republicans let them get away with this, let themselves be pushed around so. Perhaps they haven't studied the end of the Weimar Republic as much as I.

If the deal is going through now and the Bizarro-World episode is almost over, if we're there, it's because mainstream Republicans are siding with the Democrats against the Tea Party in sufficient numbers. Which they should have been doing since well before the 2010 midterms, from the point of view of they own self-interest, nevermind considerations of things like sanity, reality and common decency. 3 years' worth of cooperation with idiots and psychopaths, the most spectacular example of which, before the last couple of weeks, was the 2011 budget crisis, has done huge damage to the Republican brand. I predicted it had well before the 2012 elections. Democratic gains in 2012, due in no small part to the defections of non-batshit-crazy Republican voters appalled at everything for which the Tea Party stands, proved me right, and the catastrophic plummeting of Republican approval ratings during the shutdown is sending the same message to any Republican with ears and a functioning brain: Dump the Tea Party, the sooner and more emphatically, the better.

You can't be a little bit pregnant and you can't be a little bit okay with psychotic political partners. When the whole fucking world is appalled at your political allies of convenience, whether you're von Papen in 1932 and those partners are the Nazis or you're John Boehner in 2013 and those partners are the Tea Party, it's time to stop and consider the opinion of the whole fucking world, and think about whether, in the long term, that opinion should outweigh the political gains you're trying to obtain by allying yourself with a fringe group of fascists who hate you just as much and respect you just as little as they do anyone else.

The 2012 elections told mainstream Republicans that their partnership with the Tea Party was political poison, that it was just a sheer disaster. Some of them listened. The public reaction to the shutdown is telling them the same thing. A few more have been listening, still not very many. The 2014 midterms will scream it so loud you'll wonder how anyone possibly couldn't hear. But keep in mind that many mainstream Republicans still thought Romney was going to be elected President late in the evening of Election Day 2012. Perhaps things like that should make us wonder whether many of the mainstream Republicans aren't just plain stupid. I'm talking about the mainstream, never mind the Mad Hatters of the Tea Party.

Anyway: Republican Senators and Congresspeople, on behalf of the Democratic Party, thanks once again for providing us with tons of priceless campaign advertising material for which we won't have to spend a lot of money, but just quote you and run raw audio and video of you. You're really being a tremendous help.

'IT'S TIME FOR SOMEONE TO ACT LIKE A GROWN-UP'

That's a huge banner headline, in bold print with letters an inch high, over a story about more traditional Republicans lambasting the batshit-crazy Tea Party and its minions such as John Boehner for not facing reality and ending the government shutdown. It's a quote from John Sununu.

Next to the Tea Party, John Sununu is a moderate, centrist voice of reason and conciliation.

Under that banner headline is a big picture of Ted Cruz and John Boehner. Such a picture is not a reassuring sight under such a headline. Well, really, it's just about Boehner. Cruz can continue to act crazy, or to be crazy, if it's the case that it's not an act. It doesn't really matter much what Cruz does. As I've pointed out before on this blog, Boehner can end this shutdown any time he likes. Republican approval ratings plummet rapidly as he refuses to end the shutdown and the days go by. More and more pollsters are saying that, because of other things too but mostly because of this shutdown, the Republicans are in danger of losing their majority in the House in the 2014 midterms, which would mean that the Speakership, which according to insiders is why Boehner follows the Tea Party's lead, would go back to a Democrat anyway. The party that the President doesn't belong to almost always gains seats in congress in midterm elections; the last time this was not the case was in 1998, when the voters punished Congressional Republicans for wasting everybody's time with a silly spectacle, the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Well, this shutdown is much worse than that impeachment, not just in my opinion but also according to all the public opinion polls. The Republicans hurt themselves by coming close to a shutdown in 2011, and they're hurting themselves much worse now. That's the one piece of very good news in all of this stupidity and insanity: it will all be over, in a very big way, at the very latest, when the next Congress is sworn in after the 2014 midterms, and in a bigger way the longer the shutdown lasts and the more default becomes a reality. I'm a Democrat, a partisan in a very big way, as regular readers of my blog have no doubt long since noticed. Still, in this case, concern for humanity in general far outweighs even my party loyalty, and so I hope that the people in the Republican party who, by virtue of contrast with the Tea Party, look like voices of reason, can soon somehow manage to point out the writing on the wall to John Boehner. The sooner the better. Put a clean bill up for a vote, Mr Speaker. Today. The way you should've done before the shutdown, thus preventing the shutdown. Things will only get worse for many people, most assuredly including you, until you do.

"Doo, doo, doo..."

Boehner's answer to questions about allowing a vote on a clean bill is Doo, doo, doo... I wonder, will "Doo, doo, doo..." be Boehner's legacy? Is that what he will be remembered for? I'm picturing posters and T-shirts with a drawing of Boehner wearing a toga and a laurel wreath on a balcony overlooking a Washington, DC in flames, plucking at a lyre and humming: "Doo, doo, doo..." Every minute that Boehner continues to prevent a vote on a clean bill, the harder it gets for me to accept the "conventional wisdom" about him, that he's actually quite smart, and only acts the way he does because of exceptional pressure from the TP. (There's nothing conventional about wisdom, there never has been anything conventional about it. If there were, every issue of TIME and USA Today would be jam-packed with wisdom.) Maybe it's time to try getting Boehner's attention by jingling shiny objects in front of him.

Can Republican Congresspeople Literally Not Do Math --

-- or at least, not when they're drunk?

"There are not votes in the House to pass a clean CR," John Boehner said today on ABC's This Week. But there are. As far as I know, no Democrat is against such a bill. I'm not just talking about House Democrats. I'm talking about the Democrats in the House, the Senate, the White House, and Democratic Governors and mayors and councilmen and -women and part-time volunteers such as myself. NONE of us, given the chance, would vote against a clean bill and keep the shutdown going. Besides 100% of the House Democrats, 21 House Republicans have said they would vote for a clean bill. Which means, obviously, that my question at the beginning of this post is unfair: around 9% of the House Republicans, 21 of them, can do math well enough to see that the government shutdown is hurting their party tremendously. That leaves around 91% percent of them who can't crunch the numbers well enough to see that the shutdown is causing their already-leaky ship to sink like a stone.

That 91% of Congressional Republicans wouldn't be enough to stop a clean bill on their own. Because the GOP currently occupies more than 50% of the House Seats, however, a little over 0.4% of the House Republicans, a little over 0.2% of the entire House, the Speaker of the House, that boozy, teary faced Cowardly Lion, John Boehner, is not allowing the vote. Many so-called pundits allege that Boehner is not stupid, and that his actions comprise a masterly balancing act between the Tea Party and the realtively-sane parts of the GOP, but maybe we should take him at his word, maybe he's really too dumb to see that all 200 Democrats in the House plus 21 Republicans add up to more than enough to pass a clean bill and end the shutdown just as soon as he decides to hold the vote.

Or maybe I'm just too dumb to see the intricacies of a "masterly balancing act." Yeah, right. Boehner's refusal to get this done looks like nothing but stupidity to me. The Tea Party is done, they're toast. Around 9% of the House Republicans have grasped this and are doing their best to wash the Tea Party stink off of themselves. The longer Boehner waits, the harder it will be for him ever to disassociate himself from them.