- Of his takeover of France, Napoleon famously commented that all he had to do was to pick up the crown that was lying in the gutter. Plenty of senators and influential members of the House could fill it by proposing their own alternative visions and trying to get them implemented, which is their job. Tom Cotton has taken steps in this direction when it comes to immigration. Mike Lee and Marco Rubio are also candidates; their insistence on including a large child tax credit in the tax bill is quite laudable. But while this represents an implicit vision of what the GOP's tax vision should be, it is not an explicit one. Ivanka might be able to fill that role! Like him or not, Stephen Bannon definitely tried to do it, and got expelled as a result. The crown is in the gutter.
The article was fine, but nobody doubts that the GOP lacks leadership, and it's pretty clear why - Ex: Donald Trump's 2013 response to the The Growth and Opportunity Project. With someone like that ostensibly wearing the crown, you're not going to see many folks scrambling over themselves to mock-up cleverly acronymed, 100 page analyses on why crowns get guttered in the first place. I get what Gobry's trying to do, tying the GOP's historical frenetics to a lack of direction to incompetence - that's fair, and it's what they've created for themselves by making a reactionary, issue-specific platform. But this is a new breed of incompetence, and it's origin is the author of 140-character tweets.
Is Trump a cause or a symptom, though? John Boehner is an evil little shit but he's a lot more competent than Paul Ryan. The argument of the article isn't purely that the Republicans have been driving out competence, but it's certainly a factor. If they've created an environment where Michelle Bachmann does well and John Boehner does poorly, they've created an environment where competence is not an asset.
Not sure if you're being rhetorical, but asking if Trump is a cause or a symptom is akin to asking whether heroin addiction is a cause or a symptom. The answer is yes. Godry is correct that the GOP has basically been rotting since the end of the Cold War. They've tried to cram the square pegs that are "against terrorism" and "against taxes" into the round hole of "against communism" but it's just not fitting right. Lubricated by a thick layer of KFC grease, Trump has been able to squeeze himself into a hole he didn't have much to do with creating, but damn if he isn't splitting it wide open. Did you see that viral video of Bernie Sanders eviscerating Steve Mnuchin? It's a thing to behold, because Mnuchin is left almost speechless, but he sits there with the smug look of someone who doesn't give a shit about being wrong because he knows that there isn't a logical rip in space-time big enough to make the GOP give a shit how bad his tax bill is. They've reached critical mass, and the light and heat from their bullshit can no longer escape orbit, and thus it's turning in on itself. Competence surely isn't an asset, because any attempts to compute 'A' and 'not A' simultaneously break logic machines. Only a guy who claims that the Constitution is Christian scripture can compute this logic. Thus the ascendancy of fictional hyperboles like Roy Moore makes sense. "Terror Babies!" "Death Panels!" "Job Creators!" It's difficult to not sense that the mountains of horseshit that they've been shoveling for the past quarter century aren't beginning to decay. Hopefully it decays into fertilizer and doesn't cause a cholera epidemic. One of the upsides of Trump being elected is the awakening on sexual harassment. I don't think that without "grab 'em by the pussy" that we'd have people like Glenn Thrush and Charlie Rose being suspended. Harassment is no longer something creeps from the other side do; it took someone as disgusting as Trump to make us recognize that. I hope he'll have a similar effect in other areas (racism, classism, etc.). Trump is a symptom and a disease, and he's finally convincing us to make that doctor's appointment we've been putting off for too long. If his tax bill keeps getting this level of criticism (even the most generous estimates say it costs $1 trillion), there's a good chance that will collapse, too. Maybe at that point Godry will start to be taken seriously by his fellow conservatives.
I found Ezra Klein's conversation with Rebecca Trainer very enlightening. She remarks that the whole awakening we're going through now is not just about unearthing the sexual harassment itself, but probably more about finally seeing repercussions for that harassment. As in, the difference between Chris Rock and Harvey Weinstein is that only one of those two careers is destroyed because of the awful things they've done to women. What people hoped was that Trump's sexual harassment would have repercussions on his political career and that it didn't says a lot about how far we still have to go.I don't think that without "grab 'em by the pussy" that we'd have people like Glenn Thrush and Charlie Rose being suspended.
What I'm saying is that without Trump, there is no Weinstein. If Trump were to have lost, like we all expected, then we would have patted ourselves on the back and said, "See, the system works! You assault women, you pay." His victory gave rise to the women's march and similar events, which were supposed to be about power and not just Trump. So when another Big Bad Wolf is exposed, but this time a liberal, it's up to liberals to put up or shut up. It looks for now as if we're not making a distinction between political leanings, which should of course be the case. I heard one guy say that the Trump presidency is America resetting its broken bone. This is part of that.
Trainer's point is also that were it not for Trump, this backlash against harassment would never be as strong as it is. She also worries about what the backlash against #metoo might be, and now I kinda worry about that as well. Let's hope this resetting the bone doesn't break even more.
We watch the demise of the Republican party... and looming behind us is the utterly terrifying view of the hapless Democrats being in power, completely unchecked. The Republicans are sociopaths, and they know it. "I got mine, so I'm better than you, so I get to make the rules, so fuck you." The Democrats are incredulous half-wits with an affinity for funding government projects over stimulating free market thinking. They are perfectly happy to eat other Democrats for lunch over the smallest infraction, while bedding down with any industry shill with a checkbook. I cheer the end of the Republican party. I fear a Democrat hegemony.
The Republican party, at its core, believes that a freer market is better for the economy and all of its participants. This has metastasized into a belief that the participants should be told whatever they need to hear in order to get the freest market possible. The Democratic party, at its core, believes that the people need to be protected from the excesses of its participants. This has metastasized into a belief that those participants should be given whatever they want because fuckin' hell the people ain't got no money and elections are expensive, yo. We used to have Democrats and Republicans. We now have Republicans and Plutocrats. You may fear a Democrat hegemony but you'll have a tough time convincing me we'd suffer much were every (R) to suffer immediate, painful and lasting extinction.
Except that's not even true any more, as they constantly gerrymander every single playing field into one that favors certain players over others. That's what pisses them off so much about the internet, I think, and why they have dispatched Ajit Pal to destroy it... it is the levelest playing field out there, and allows a college kid in an Ivy League dorm room to slap a web site together, and now serve BILLIONS of customers, and employ 17,000. (No, really. Over seventeen THOUSAND people are employed by Facebook... to build a web site? Really?) If the Republicans were truly businesspeople, pro-business, they would make the playing field as FLAT as possible, so only the most viable businesses would win. Instead, we have coal miners refusing retraining because Faux News tells them Trumpy is gonna bring their jerbs back... ... and tech companies running like cats on fire from Trumpy's Technology Advisory Council... ... and, well, the Dakota Access Pipeline spill. Fucking morons. The whole passel of them. This has metastasized into a belief that the participants should be told whatever they need to hear in order to get the freest market possible.