Why the GOP refuses to make a counter offer in fiscal cliff negotiations (Daily Kos)

The past few weeks it seems like I’ve been getting frustrated more easily than usual. Cold weather never brightens my mood, and perhaps the stress of my teaching load ballooning last October is finally taking its toll on me, but I think a good part of the blame can be laid on the Republican party and their reaction to last month’s elections. At times I have to hold myself back from venting about the alternative reality Republicans have set up for themselves because it feels like it’s too easy to take to a caricature, but sometimes it feels like that alternative reality is already so much of a caricature that I couldn’t possibly come up with anything more ludicrous than the baloney they’re trying to peddle. Given how Republicans have been acting since election day, you almost have to think that Fox News and Glenn Beck are reporting to people that Mitt Romney will be sworn in as president next month.

Dealing with setbacks is difficult, sometimes to the point of being excruciating, but the most important thing is to learn from them. In the case of losing a major argument — which is certainly a valid way to look at a presidential election — there are three questions that are helpful to ask to determine what went wrong, so that you know what to do in future arguments.

1. Was the message wrong?
This is perhaps the diciest one of all to pinpoint. Generally speaking, I think the American public is open to the premise of lower taxes and reduced government; it’s been a part of our cultural DNA since the Reagan Revolution. The problem is that those years also brought us a government whose powers were so reduced that they directly led to catastrophe after catastrophe, from the S&L bailout, to the pathetic initial responses to Hurricane Katrina, to the financial crash of four years ago, and a whole host of problems in between. Even viewed outside of that lens, there’s still the fact that the Tea Party movement forced Republicans to take a hard turn to the right, so the extent to which they want to reduce government programmes may be too much for the American public to handle. I’d label this one a “yes,” but not to the same extent as the other two.

2. Was the way the message was communicated wrong?
This may get more to the heart of the Republicans’ problems. Mitt Romney’s gaffes were legion in this past campaign — even in that first debate against President Obama he so handily won, his line about Big Bird came back to haunt him later — but the problem extends further than that.  Even after Sharron Angle’s shocking “[turn] a lemon situation into lemonade” comment in 2010 explaining why a young woman who’s been raped shouldn’t have access to abortion, two other Republican senatorial candidates lost what should have been easy races this year by claiming that women’s bodies have ways to prevent them from getting pregnant in the event of a “legitimate rape” and that a pregnancy from rape is “something God intended” to explain why not even rape and incest survivors should have access to abortion. Some conservatives even had the gall to suggest that these were “small issues” and women who were concerned about what Republicans would do to reproductive rights should focus more on the economy. There were certainly other issues on which Republicans seemed almost tone-deaf to the American public this campaign season, but all these outrageous statements about abortion probably cost them three Senate seats in just the past two elections, and probably played a significant factor in Romney’s loss.

3. Was the choice of messenger wrong?
I think even Republicans have to admit now that Romney had more than his share of faults; the man seemed to have next to no personality, and his actions at Bain Capital undercut the “here’s a CEO to fix the economy” argument because it was too easy to see him selling off America chunk by chunk and putting the savings right in the pockets of his rich friends. The infamous “47 percent” video only solidified that perception of Romney, and showed a mind-boggling lack of understanding about the American electorate and, in particular, one of the most critical voting blocs for Republicans: working-class people who believe that lowering taxes on the rich will benefit them. That’s a sizable chunk of the Republican base; like P.T. Barnum said, there’s one of them born every minute. I don’t know if the Republicans had a better candidate to run, though; Sarah Palin is way too shrill to attract moderates, Mike Huckabee’s practically leading the whole “no rape or incest exceptions if we ban abortion” crusade, and Chris Christie seems to love being a jerk a little too much to attract swing voters on a national stage.

If we assume that conservatives aren’t so delusional to believe that Mitt Romney actually won last month, then if they’re looking at the possibilities enumerated above, they must be going for the only-visible-by-super-secret-conservative-decorder-ring fourth option: Everything was correct and we just need to say it louder.

That’s the only explanation I can come up with for why talks about tax rates and the debt ceiling and the so-called “fiscal cliff” are being dominated by Republicans continuing to hold true to the very stances that just led them to defeat, demanding that what exists of their proposals be taken seriously (trying to fix revenue problems only by closing loopholes is like trying to mend a fresh bullet wound with nothing but Scotch tape) while dismissing everything the White House puts out, even going so far as to claim that Obama hasn’t made any “real” proposals. (He has.) This is the same logic that John McCain uses when he calls a press conference to decry why he hasn’t been given more information about the Benghazi attacks in September while his Senate committee was getting an intelligence briefing on the Benghazi attacks. In any reasonably intelligent setting, behaviour like this should get Senator McCain pulled off of the American political stage with a shepherd’s crook, to the sound of derisive laughter from all fifty states, but this seems to be business as usual for Republicans these days.

Speaking of Benghazi, this leads to perhaps the most bat-guano insane thing the far right has pulled since the election, claiming that President Obama should be impeached because he allegedly let our consulate officials in Benghazi be murdered. This is a claim that fails to pass the most rudimentary “smell test” of logic, because the only way this could possibly be true is if President Obama somehow has the personality and mindset of a bad B-movie villain who let innocent Americans be killed because … he hates America? It’s all part of his secret atheist Muslim agenda to turn us all into socialists? The whole Susan Rice thing has been getting more attention in the mainstream press, but the fact that supposedly credible conservatives are floating this impeachment idea should make them the laughingstock of the nation. Again, it all goes back to Republicans who can’t bear to accept that President Obama got elected (the “birther” pablum) and now re-elected, desperate for even the flimsiest excuse to try to pull him out of office. (Do these people even realize that if somehow President Obama is thrown out of office then they’ll just have to deal with Joe Biden as President? Do they think there’s some secret provision in the Constitution that would let them install Sarah Palin or another Republican in Obama’s place?)

Unfortunately, the Republican party has shown itself all too willing to entrench its power and dig in its heels as far as possible, as evidenced by the explosion in Senate filibusters since Obama took office and House Republicans not letting Democratic bills get on the House floor after the 2010 midterms. President Obama talks a lot about how extending the Bush 43 tax cuts for income below $250,000 has already passed the Senate and he only needs a few conscientious Republicans in the House willing to swallow some bad medicine to get the bill to his desk, but even if Obama could find those Republicans, does he really think Eric Cantor would allow that bill to get on the House floor? His only choice is to wait the clock out, let everyone’s rates rise at the end of the year, then try to get the lower-income tax rates reduced again through a separate bill. I have to wonder if House Republicans would be so spiteful as to prevent such a bill from getting passed in the next Congress.

There is a lot to be said for sticking to one’s principles and beliefs even in the face of adversity — I certainly have enough opinions that a majority of Americans would find unpalatable — but the extent to which far-right Republicans are holding this country hostage until they get their way on everything has long passed from the absurd and comical, and into the dangerous. (If I’d been doing political blogging when the Republicans got this whole “fiscal cliff” thing set up, I might have lost my mind over how they jeopardized our national credit rating.) Republican behaviour is quickly approaching the point where more and more  people are believing that the party, as a whole, has disqualified itself as being a credible political party. I just hope that enough people realize that before Republicans break out country to the point where we’ll never get it put back together again.