Neoliberalism, My Ass

[DonCoquixote]

99. I agree, with one caveat

I understand that some horse trading and pissing off of your friends may indeed need to be done, but, when the "pragmatic" types come to the table, they need to acknowledge that the rich have in effect damaged the "horse trading" mechanism they used to rely on. It used to be that even a die hard conservative realized that he or she was accountable to people that were watching them and expecting RESULTS, which meant they realized they had to give a little something, a few slices of bread. Come election time, they could tell the voters "Would you rather I lost the whole loaf?" Even the ideological realize a half loaf beats starving. What used to define America is that, however ideologically heated we were, we realized there were bills to be paid, and that we did not want to emulate the political crusades of Europe where we got high off the conflict, but ended up hungry.

However, especially after Citizens United, you have a breed of congressperson who knows they really do not have to achieve anything as long as their backers keep shoveling out the money, buying the commercials, and making sure the right pundits and megachurch clergy keep banging the drums. Look at Ted Cruz. In a saner age, someone who even THOUGHT of having America default would have been ruined. Here, he came very close to winning the nomination, outlasting the aristocrats like Jeb Bush, only to be beaten out by someone who does not even PRETEND to DISLIKE the idea of defaulting, who advocates it as something that is a secret of his success. It is not that Trump is merely and example of all this is wrong with the GOP, it is that those who want to emulate him know that there are a bunch of robber barons willing to pay them to imitate Trump. It says a lot that in just four years, Mitt Romney has gone from being Obama's main opponent to someone that, in his own right, could get a respectable amount of hate on Fox News.

All I am saying is this, yes I know our Democrats need to make sausage, and to quote Bismarck, making those sausages is not pretty. However, in light of the fact that some of those GOP "co workers" at the sausage factory are begin hired to sabotage the process, I would expect them to start from a higher position towards the left, so that by the time the process is done, we end up somewhere like a 4 to 6 out of ten, ten being leftism as defined by FDR. As is, we start the negotiation already saying "I know we wont get anything more than a three, and by the time the GOP applies its saboteurs, we end up at -1.