What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

What a long strange trip it’s been for America.  And it keeps getting stranger by the minute.

Jon Perr at Crooks and Liars warns:

Last year, the Roadblock Republicans of the 110th Congress set the all-time filibuster record.  Forcing 104 cloture votes by October 2008, the Senate’s GOP minority easily eclipsed the old mark of 61 filibusters.  And now, fresh on the heels of “elated” and “celebrating” House Republicans’ refusal to provide a single vote in support of President Obama’s $825 economic recovery package, Senate Republicans are now suggesting they will filibuster the stimulus bill.

As NLinStPaul notes in her analysis of this filibuster threat, ThinkProgress has reported the latest in Republican obstructionism:

While Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions offered a none-too-thinly veiled threat of a GOP filibuster (“I think its going to take 60 votes to pass the bill”), Arizona’s John Kyl said he would explore “whatever parliamentary possibilities are in front of us.” Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) promised to join the effort, announcing, “I would be a part of it.” And on Thursday, Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told Robert Siegel on NPR that a filibuster of the Obama package passed by the House could be in the cards.

In what cards?  These cards?

Rush Limbaugh and a deck of Tarot cards, that’s all the RePugs have left.

 

I have no doubt Obama has a strategy, no doubt it has been carefully conceived and is being implemented. But as NLinStPaul notes, progressives disagree on what it is and whether it will work. Disagreement and doubts are merited, for how does one deal with a political party comprised of people who are clinically insane? Reality means nothing to them, they create their own reality.  Like “massive voter fraud”, voter fraud so massive it threatened the very fabric of American democracy.

Except it wasn’t massive, as Brad Friedman observes:

After all the stuff, nonsense, bullshit, lies, hoaxes, WSJ “editorials”, Fox “News” Alerts, Presidential candidate lies, phony “conspiracy” claims, and-wall-to-wall cable and radio garbage that we had to endlessly suffer through, for months on end, leading up to last year’s election, about supposed, massive “voter fraud” being committed — by Democrats, naturally — it turns out that in one of OH’s largest counties, an exhaustive investigation by a Republican Special Prosecutor, appointed by his former GOP prosecutor partner (the Hamilton County Prosecutor who was also a state co-chair for the McCain/Palin campaign) looked into hundreds of “serious” allegations of such “fraud” and found exactly one such case.

And the guy had already turned himself in.  His vote was not counted.

That’s just one example of the chronic bat shit insanity of Republicans.  So what do we do?

A XXVIIIth Amendment to the Constitution is a possible solution . . .

Sane political discourse being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to institutionalize Republicans, shall not be infringed.

Is anyone here with me on this amendment thing?

Oh, we’re afraid to go with you on that, Rusty.  We might get in trouble.  

Well then, just kiss my ass from now on.   Not me.  I’m not gonna take this!   Boehner, he’s going down! McConnell, going down!  Kyl and Sessions and Cornyn, going down!

Otter’s with me!  

Rusty’s right.  Psychotic, but absolutely right.  We gotta take these bastards.  Now, we could fight ’em with conventional weapons, but that could take years, and cost millions of lives.  No, in this case, I think we have to go all out.  I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part.

Thank you, Chairman Conyers.  Every time an absolutely futile and stupid gesture has been required, you’ve delivered . . .

Yes, what a long strange trip it’s been for America.  And with Limbaugh and Tarot cards as the foundation of Republican strategery, it looks like it’s going to keep getting stranger by the minute.  

This country has accomplished great good in this world, but it’s also been the instrument of too much evil.  The Statue of Liberty was on Larry King last night, and confessed:

Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me . . .

Other times, I can barely see . . .