"American Conservatives And Oppositional-Defiant Disorder"
Alan: Oppositional-Defiant Disorder is an adolescent disease in which the immature mind gets stuck in patterns of habitual defiance. Afflicted by this syndrome, contemporary Republicans have become eternal teenagers, sultry whiners who never grew up, never learned the sine qua non importance of compromise.
"Do Republicans Do Anything But Piss, Moan, Bitch, Whine?"
Thus frozen in sundry states of arrested development, most modern "conservatives" construe perfectionism as cure rather than disease.
"Is Perfectionism A Curse? Paul Ryan Tells The Truth"
Religion and Perfectionism
Perfectionism As A Crippling Imperfection
"Is Perfectionism A Curse? Paul Ryan Tells The Truth"
Religion and Perfectionism
Perfectionism As A Crippling Imperfection
Living in inviolable towers of too pure principles, they have become exemplars of Voltaire's dictum: "The best is enemy of the good."
Once an enemy of goodness -- and regardless any Pharasaic veneer -- all that's left is perpetual squabble over which "goody two shoes" gets teacher's "Golden Star."
My 67 years have revealed that a surprisingly low dose of idealism deprives people of reality, rendering them wraiths in the land of the living.
Compendium Of Best Pax Posts: Plutocracy, Economic Inequality & Collapse Of Conservatism
http://paxonbothhouses.
Republicans can’t stop fighting — even when they aren’t fighting Barack Obama
Since they won control of both houses in last November’s election, everyone has said that Republicans now have to “show they can govern.” But more than that, they have to actually govern, whether they’re showing it or not. And the current intra-Republican conflict over the budget shows that they may have gotten so used to shaking their fists and drawing lines in the sand that many of them can’t imagine any other way to go about negotiating — even when Barack Obama and the Democrats aren’t involved.
Republicans have been arguing bitterly among themselves for days now over a budget resolution — whether it will increase military spending, and if so, whether some of the money will be offset by other budget cuts or not. At various moments the conflict has pitted fiscal hawks against military hawks, the House leadership against uppity backbenchers, and the House against the Senate. The drama, which included a failed late-night voteWednesday in the House Budget Committee, has largely been around a mere $20 billion of the $600 billion Republicans want to spend next year on the military. It sometimes seems like an endless episode of “Real Housewives,” where even the tiniest disagreement quickly turns to shouted insults and overturned chairs.
Speaker John Boehner is now crafting some parliamentary maneuvers that will get the GOP budget to a successful floor vote in a way that lets everyone tell themselves they won. I’m sure that eventually he’ll get there, though there may be more Keystone Cops pratfalls between now and then. But all this sturm und drang comes before Republicans can even start negotiating with their real enemy in the White House.
It suggests that at least some Republicans — enough to gum up the system — have so assimilated confrontation as a political strategy that they don’t know any other way to operate, even when they’re dealing with their allies (and they’re spurred on by conservative groups like Heritage Action that encourage intra-Republican conflict). The refusal to compromise is a political strategy, one whose efficacy people disagree about (some say the GOP made themselves look terrible with all the crises they created in the last few years; others respond that it didn’t seem to hurt them at the polls). But it was never much of a legislative strategy, if your goal is to actually craft a bill.
What we may be learning now is that what many Republicans oppose isn’t compromise with Democrats or compromise with Barack Obama, but compromise per se, on anything. I’d wager that a few weeks ago you wouldn’t have been able to find too many GOP House members to tell you that they cared deeply and passionately about whether funds for the military are contained within the Overseas Contingency Operations budget or the regular Pentagon budget, or who would say that $20 billion in military spending was worth staging dramatic fights with their Republican colleagues over. But once a disagreement emerged, they quickly snapped into confrontation mode.
To repeat, this is all happening even before they embark on what will surely be another dramatic confrontation over the budget with congressional Democrats and the White House. Standing their ground and promising to fight may be the only way some in the GOP know how to operate, but it doesn’t appear that they’re getting any better at it.
Paul Waldman is a contributor to The Plum Line blog, and a senior writer at The American Prospect.
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