Last night, he couldn't get the votes to pass a truly horrid plutocrat's wet dream. He couldn't get the votes to gut Obamacare or Wall Street reform. He couldn't get the votes to throw children off food stamps and he couldn't get the votes to throw the elderly off meals-on-wheels. He couldn't get the votes for a simple, vicious stunt. He couldn't get the votes because he couldn't budge enough Republicans to support a tax increase in the upper .01 percent of taxpayers. He couldn't do it because he had nothing with which to threaten people who look on governing the country as though they are running an evening-drive talk-radio program in Bugtussle. He couldn't do it because he is a Republican pretending to be a fanatic who went hat in hand to a bunch of fanatics pretending to be Republicans.
Which sounds accurate enough to me, but then I'm partial to hearing gloom and doom predictions for the American right wing, so I tend to doubt my own satisfaction on this score.
But then I hear something similar (if less...expressive) from a member of said right wing:
Persuading a majority of Republicans to cast a politically treacherous vote to allow higher taxes could have enhanced his leverage with Obama in future talks to rein in the national debt, Republicans said. But failure could imperil his hold on power, said Craig Shirley, a Republican consultant who wrote a biography of former president Ronald Reagan.
“If this was a parliamentary system, tonight’s dissent on Plan B would be seen as a vote of no confidence in Boehner,” Shirley said. “The national GOP is now simply a collection of warring tribal factions.”
Well I have to say that the prospect of that particular Somalia-on-the-Potomac sounds like fun.
Though I can't see that shooting the fiscal Niagara is going to be that pleasant, either for the US or the rest of us.
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