Dysfunctional America

In his latest NY Times op-ed, Paul Krugman lays bare the political insanity that is destroying America:

Former Senator Alan Simpson is a Very Serious Person. He must be — after all, President Obama appointed him as co-chairman of a special commission on deficit reduction.

So here’s what the very serious Mr. Simpson said on Friday: “I can’t wait for the blood bath in April. ... When debt limit time comes, they’re going to look around and say, ‘What in the hell do we do now? We’ve got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give ’em a piece of meat, real meat,’ ” meaning spending cuts. “And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary,” he continued.

Think of Mr. Simpson’s blood lust as one more piece of evidence that our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize.

Some explanation: There’s a legal limit to federal debt, which must be raised periodically if the government keeps running deficits; the limit will be reached again this spring. And since nobody, not even the hawkiest of deficit hawks, thinks the budget can be balanced immediately, the debt limit must be raised to avoid a government shutdown. But Republicans will probably try to blackmail the president into policy concessions by, in effect, holding the government hostage; they’ve done it before.

Now, you might think that the prospect of this kind of standoff, which might deny many Americans essential services, wreak havoc in financial markets and undermine America’s role in the world, would worry all men of good will. But no, Mr. Simpson “can’t wait.” And he’s what passes, these days, for a reasonable Republican.

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.

There is more, far more. Go read the whole article.

I keep thinking of the saying "with friends like these, who needs enemies?" The US is wasting hundreds of billions fighting "foreign enemies" when in fact the guns should be turned around and the country needs to deal first with internal enemies. The joke is that the Republicans are the party of "the House Un-American Activities Committee that so-disrupted the country in the early 1950s. They were chasing "communists" when in fact the American Communist party was a faction of a faction that was dying a natural death because of the political antics of Stalin. But this is the very party that has been intent for the past thirty years to destroy the country in order to "loosen up the entrepreneurial spirit" and create a "trickle down" economy. In reality, they bankrupted the country under Reagan and have gone from bad to worse ever since. Sad.