by KenI make no secret of the fact that I love Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr., not least for his seemingly unshakable decency. Even the bad people he finds it necessary to dress down come out sounding less, well, indecent in his retelling. What I sometimes worry about, though, is whether his decency may not sometimes lead him to underestimate the indecency of generally indecent people.Which is a prelude to saying that I hope he's right in suggesting in his column today, "Shutdown: The tea party's last stand," that the Teabaggers have really outbagged themselves this time, "suffering from extreme miscalculation and a foolish misreading of its opponents' intentions," which has in turn "created a moment of enlightenment, an opening to see things that were once missed."Oh, E.J. gets that "many Republicans saw the disaster coming in advance of the shutdown." And yet so afraid of the Teabaggers were they that "people who knew better followed Sen. Ted Cruz down a path of confrontation over Obamacare," a path that may have led them to disaster.E.J. pays particular attention to "the hot-microphone incident last week when Sen. Rand Paul was caught plotting strategy with Sen. Mitch McConnell, and "Paul's words, spoken after he had finished a television interview, said more than he realized."Young Rand told Miss M that he'd just made a big point on CNN of how "we're willing to compromise, we're willing to negotiate" -- a lie, of course, but one that the Republican polls have discovered plays well in the heartland. Pretending to be willing to compromise, it seems, gets you points for moderation among a fed-up-with-all-pols public without incurring the inconvenience of actually, you know, trying to compromise. And Young Rand drove the point home by ridiculing Democrats for not having poll-tested the "We won't negotiate" position."It's revealing," says E.J., "to hear a politician who is supposed to be all about principle mocking Democrats for failing to do enough poll-testing." But there is, he says, a larger and more important lesson here.In Young Rand's telling, the new Republican line is: ""We wanted to defund it, we fought for that, but now we're willing to compromise on this." Which makes E.J. wonder, "If just days after it began, a shutdown that was about repealing Obamacare is not about repealing Obamacare, then what is it about?" And he points out that even conservatives are calling this "the Seinfeld Shutdown": "It's about absolutely nothing, at least where substance is concerned."But to the right-wing nutjobs' surprise, the president chose to fight back -- a fight that he must win, E.J. says, "because victory is essential to re-establishing constitutional governance, a phrase that the tea party ought to understand." (Small question: What makes E.J. think the Teabaggers have any understanding of "constitutional governance"?)
Obama didn't need to "poll-test" his position because the poll that matters, the 2012 election, showed that the tea party hit its peak long ago, in the summer of 2011, when it seemed to have the president on the defensive.The slowly building revolt among Republicans against the tea party shutdown is one sign of how quickly the hard-right's influence is fading. So is the very language they are being required to speak. Having talked incessantly about how useless and destructive government can be, House Republicans are now testifying to their reverence for what government does for veterans, health research, sick children and lovers of national parks, especially war memorials.Appreciation for government rises when it's no longer there. By pushing their ideology to its obvious conclusion, members of the Cruz-Paul right forced everyone else to race the other way.
"Yes," E.J. acknowledges, "the tea party will still have its Washington-based groups that raise money by bashing Washington, ginning up the faithful and threatening the less ideologically pure with primary challenges."
But no Republican and no attentive citizen of any stripe will forget the mess these right-wing geniuses have left in their wake.We now know that the tea party is primarily about postures aimed at undercutting sensible governance and premised on the delusion that Obama's election victories were meaningless. Its leaders abandon these postures as soon as their adversaries stand strong and the poll-testers report their approach is failing. This will give pause to anyone ever again tempted to follow them into a cul-de-sac.
One can surely hope.But here's where I worry about E.J.'s fundamental decency kicking in. When he talks about "no Republican and no attentive citizen of any stripe [forgetting] the mess these right-wing geniuses have left in their wake," is he not perhaps giving them too much credit? These are people who have been trained for decades to have minimal awareness of reality and hardly any constructive memory (by which I mean memory of reality, not to be confused with the lies and delusions fed them by far-right-wing manipulators), and I continue to wonder whether any sizable number of them have even yet understood what the Teabaggers have done to them.I'm inclined to think, rather, that when the unspeakably vile Sean Hannity and the unspeakiably vile Sen. Ted Cruz -- talk about two people who were meant for each other! -- put their empty heads together to assail President Obama for cruelty to sick children," their viewers will take it at face value, completely misunderstanding who did what. As E.J. notes, even the goony right-wingers have been forced to pay lip service to functions of government that they esteem, but it was precisely, exactly, and unmitigatedly Senator Ted's plan and mission to shut the whole damned thing down, just as his side succeeded in doing.It's important not to forget how hard the Right has worked to demonize government, and how much it has profited from its success at doing so. Naturally, there are lots of things our government does that are worthy of ridicule and worse (hey, it's a major part of what we do here at DWT), but to pretend that this is the sum total of what government does is a perversion of reality of monumental proportions.And if you want proof of how deeply that perversion has been buried in the American psyche, tune in most any night to Jay Leno's monologue. An utterly typical example:
It is day three of the government shutdown. Right now 33 percent of the government is doing absolutely nothing, which is not bad considering that before the shutdown 80 percent wasn't doing anything.
This isn't just a dreadful joke, it's a joke built on an explosively dangerous lie. And it's not gentle joshing, it's far-right propaganda passed off baldly as truth.So maybe the lies and delusions and substantive emptiness of the Teabaggers have been exposed fatally. I'm just not so sure.Meanwhile, do yourself a favor and rather than settling for my potted version, read E.J.'s column in its entirety. My original thought was just to introduce it and then run the whole thing. Then I thought I would make a few comments and run the whole thing. If you've read this far, I guess it's too late to suggest that you skip it and just read E.J.'s whole thing."Many Republicans," says E. J., "saw the disaster coming in advance of the shutdown. But they were terrified to take on a movement that is fortified by money, energy and the backing of a bloviating brigade of talk-show hosts."#For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."
