This is why I can never decide if they are more accurately described as nihilists (who don’t believe in anything, including science, evidence, or well-reasoned argument) or zealots (for whom ruining the federal government is the point).
On Thursday, the National Parks Service announced that furloughs would curtail services at such popular destinations as Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. And on Friday, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood released a list of airfields that could close due to Federal Aviation Administration furloughs.
Conservatives were unimpressed. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan “fired more than 10,000 air traffic controllers. There could have been massive disruption. But there wasn’t,” said Chris Edwards, a budget expert at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Okay, then. Never mind that it took ten years to restore full staffing for our air traffic control system, as long as there was no “massive” disruption, then no biggie, right?
Chicken farmers in Delaware and Maryland are lobbying against cuts to food safety inspectors; the American Hospital Association is pushing to ease cuts to medical research; and defense industry executives have been prowling the halls of the Capitol for months.
But there’s no grand stop-the-sequester movement. And unless the public starts complaining, the AEI’s [John] Makin said Democrats’ best hope for persuading Republicans to reconsider the sequester may be a new recession. The sequester is forecast to slice 0.6 percentage points from economic growth this year, and destroy 750,000 jobs.
I like the word “destroy” in this context. Why sugarcoat it? The Republicans’ refusal to compromise at all, even a tiny bit, is going to destroy 750,000 jobs and possibly cause a recession. And they don’t care.
I’ll go with nihilists.
There was no “massive disruption” when Reagan fired the controllers? I seem to remember being stuck in London for a week when he did that, trying to get a flight home to the US – was I the only one?
Of course. There was tremendous disruption with a massive number of flight cancellations.
But we’re talking about a political party who believes the earth is 6000 years old and that taxes went up under Obama. You know, the Gullible Oligarch Party.
The one thing that the Republicans fear – and will bet their entire survival against – is Obama becoming for the Democrats what Reagan was for the Republicans. Their first goal was to make him an ineffectual one-term president, Jimmy Carter Jr. When that failed their next goal is to ensure that he has no legacy, or better yet from their POV, a legacy of failure so that he becomes to the Democrats what Herbert Hoover was to the Republicans. Nobody remembers anyone from Congress in the 20s but everyone remembers Hoover, and it is that level of failure that they want to hang on Obama. So tanking the economy? Part of the plan. Defaulting on the debt? Part of the plan if Obama can be blamed for it. Locusts and frogs? If they can manage it (and global warming may actually achieve it).
They’re neither zealots nor nihilists – they are evil, caring nothing about the real-world consequences of their plays for and with power.
I’ll never forget the night of the election in 2008 when every other conservative on my facebook commented, “Jimmy Carter gave way to Ronald Reagan.”
I’m sure it was a widespread belief well before the election night, but my response was simply this cartoon:
They-THE GOP- have chosen to commit ECONOMIC TREASON against this country. They decided it on January 20, 2009 – the night of the President’s FIRST Inauguration.
Nothing can be clearer than this.
And sedition too.
I go with Zealots. These people are bound and determined to ruin the government. They firmly believe the old Reagan mantra that the government is the problem.
Some might that the Bush years run counter to that, considering how much spending ballooned during that period. But the government became much more disfunctional during that period, and the increased spending had a lot more to do with crony capitalism than any belief that the government could add positive value to society. And notwithstanding the repeal of Glass Steagle during Clinton, regulatory capture became endemic during the Bush years.
Now that they no longer control the white house, they just want to stop the government from functioning, period.
Conservatives were unimpressed. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan “fired more than 10,000 air traffic controllers. There could have been massive disruption. But there wasn’t,” said Chris Edwards, a budget expert at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Kinda funny that Ray-gun’s son(the stupid one, obviously) tweeted out the same comment as the CATO guy made.
The stupid one is Michael.
Yeah .. he’s the one!!
Remembering Matt Taibbi’s caustic remarks on how there was a disconcerting amount of Scooter Chairs at the TParty rallies and then seeing the 150 FBI agents moving in on the Scooter Stores main office in response to $100 million in Medicare fraud charges, I’m inclined to think these are a breed of Nihilists who deny everyone else’s rights or beliefs in order to give themselves a Scooter. So what would that be called, a Nihilist with a Scooter agenda?
Neither. Corrupt bedwetters. Guys and gals on the take for acting crazy and scared as shit to depart any smidgen from a script lest the folks paying the freight pay someone else to act crazier. And when they retire, the get good revolving door jobs and act like mature water carriers again.
Their strategists actually believe that triggering the sequester will cause the majority of the population to wake up and fear the “muslim Kenyan socialist” spending us into oblivion.
The phrase, “Please proceed, Governor.” keeping coming to my mind.
Ain’t no fancy philosophy involved with these guys and gals, just the sort of corrupt politics we’ve seen before in this country. We need to stop dignifying it with those $5 words like “nihilist” or “zealot”. Just paid distractors.
Zealots. Have your popcorn and beer ready for the town hall meeting where one of these zealots tells audience (of recent layoffs…the people that actually work and pay taxes) they got laid off because Obama will not cut medicare and SS. Oh, and you will not be going back to work until Obama agrees to cut medicare and SS.
How about barbarians? You’ve got the tribalism, the violence, the superstition. The problem with calling them nihilists is that it’s a 19th century term. These people haven’t reached the 19th century yet.
You can add this to your equation, and perhaps add “are they just assholes” to the list. SteveM just posted: “Ross Douthat has concluded, based on God knows what evidence, that people who are underemployed and have no hope of getting an actual good-paying job have a pretty soft life:” http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2013/02/douthat-permanently-underemployed-have.html
Without reading a single comment, I’m gonna weigh in that they are anti-government zealots. My brother, my cousins, friends, college classmates. The entire lot of them have been brainwashed into believing government is bad, incompetent, and downright evil. Don’t know how to combat this, but I do know that we cannot allow them to win.
Still a Big Tent, with the 11th commandment: Nobody can ever criticize anybody else, even if they think it’s possible to go on the gold standard or that the wombs of women who use birth control are studded with tiny corpses. If anybody’s still in charge they would be people who don’t themselves run for office but just write checks. Nobody is a total nihilist: they all believe they will never die and global warming will only hurt poor people. And few are total zealots.
Zealots.
The urgency of achieving Utopia for Dummies overrules any and all consequences. Like the Wall St congregants in the Temple of Money, the Christianist branch of America’s twin faiths can also look forward to being rewarded for their catastrophic behavior because that’s what they’ve been promised.