The noise in the political world is – a lovely onomatopoeicism – cacophonous, and it’s all about 2024. The current fun is the debt limit, a drama in which the Republicans are playing the dog chasing the car, having no idea what they’ll be doing with the car that will almost undoubtedly back over them if they do set tooth to fender.
Which is to say, the Republicans are playing a lose-lose game, no matter how much they end up shouting that they won when the curtain comes down. Jolting the economy, hard, will simply function as another sign of their basic failure to understand how economies and human psychology works – last seen at the Federal government level in the 2017 tax reform bill, which did not achieve any of the predictions asserted by its conservative authors and backers. Alternatively, folding on their demands will make them look spineless.
But back to the racket numbing our ears. If you listen to conservative pundit Erick Erickson, he’d have you believe that the Republicans have the Democrats on the ropes, and never mind that they’re going up against Representative / Senator / Vice President / President Joe Biden, possibly the most experienced politician in Washington these days – and the Republicans have never shown themselves to be anything but a pack of fourth-raters, slavishly following the precepts of their predecessors and teachers, the historical revisionists descending from the Civil War. But his task is to keep the herd together; reading his public facing blog has been quite instructive of late, as he spends nearly as much time shouting at Republicans as he does Democrats. And when does shout at the latter, he leaves out inconvenient facts: a complaint about the media being slanted causing the electorate to distrust it couldn’t be bothered to note that the leading example was, without a doubt, Fox News. Moral equivalency is a sad game to play.
But don’t be fooled. Some of the Republicans are actually paying attention to the outside world, as WaPo has noted:
