Rapture Now! Hostage Politics and the American Right

Republican Lawmakers Announce Unwillingness to Take “Worldwide-Destruction Option” Off the Table

WASHINGTON,January 24, 2012—In a joint appearance today, Republican leaders of the House and Senate surprised the Washington press corps when they announced their continued commitment to the so-called “worldwide destruction option” in eleventh hour negotiations over Phase 2 of the debt ceiling increase.

Last July when Republicans succeeded in forcing President Obama and the Democrats to accept a six-month, two-stage increase in the debt ceiling to avoid defaulting on the national debt, then-Speaker of the House, John Boehner, denied rumors circulating at the time that the Republicans had a secret strategy to place even greater pressure on the Democrats in the “Phase 2” negotiations.

Cantor at today's press conference

“Rumors that there is some plan up our sleeves to threaten worldwide destruction are simply ridiculous and highly irresponsible,” said  then-Speaker Boehner during an appearance on Fox News Sunday immediately following the president's reluctant signature to the July stop-gap measure.

But within weeks, following a shakeup in House Republican leadership which saw Boehner demoted to the position of Assistant to the Lieutenant Whip of the Republican Milquetoast Sub-caucus (a face-saving post created just for the former Speaker) and the elevation of Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor to the Speaker position, House Republicans put forward a set of proposals plainly unacceptable to Democrats in the House and Senate; The GOP's  "Slash, Screw, and Bury"plan would abolish Social Security, pass the Appropriate Rewards for Success and Enterprise Act (a $9 billion program to provide direct federal funding to the nations top 5% of jobcreators), and delete all references to Franklin Roosevelt from public records. After announcing the plan in late September, Republicans began openly suggesting that failure to pass Slash, Screw, and Bury would result in a House refusal to provide any further funds devoted to securing or maintaining the safety of the nation’s nuclear stockpile.


Initially, Speaker Cantor angrily rejected the media’s labeling of the threat as the “worldwide destruction option,” insisting that the Republicans were simply pointing out that without “commonsense increases in incentives to jobcreators necessary to spur economic growth, many important functions of government might have to be curtailed,” as the Speaker put it in a October press conference.“Preserving the safety and security of the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons is an example of the sort of programs that would have to be looked at under conditions of extreme austerity that would inevitably result from failure to pass Appropriate Rewards for Success and Enterprise,” he said at the time.

Today, however, standing alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Cantor not only confirmed Republican refusal to vote for the Phase 2 debt ceiling increase, he also clearly stated his intention to move forward on cutting off funding for nuclear safety next week unless Democrats accepted the Republican legislative package.

Though not present at today’s press conference, Assistant Milquetoast Whip Boehner’s office released a statement saying, “Speaker Cantor’s stance today is a dazzling display of his usual wisdom and sound judgment.”

Though many had expected a more conciliatory tone from the Speaker following reports of a highly positive meeting at the White House last night, the Speaker and Majority leader surprised everyone present at the press conference called this afternoon. An audible gasp could be heard from the usually jaded press corps assembled in the Senate press room when the Speaker for the first time referred to his own plan as the Worldwide Destruction Option.

“As things stand,” said Cantor, “we believe the worldwide destruction option is clearly the sanest option we Republicans can come up with to fix what’s wrong with America.”

In Other News…

In case it missed your attention, as of midnight Friday, July 24, the United States is on course to no longer have an agency to regulate air safety; the FAA is in ‘partial shutdown' with full shutdown imminent.¹

That’s right; because congressional Democrats were unwilling to accept anti-union provisions in the FAA funding bill, the crucifixion caucus on the right—led in this case by House Transportation Committee Chairman (and the Republican caucus’ Assistant Nabob of Witchburning), John Mica—let the funding for FAA lapse, immediately putting 4000 air industry workers on the street with more layoffs to come.

Meanwhile, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau² is without a leader and will remain so unless and until Democrats first agree to gut the CFPB’s authority. Republicans, to their credit, have been unapologetically unambiguous about their hostage-taking strategy on this issue: they never agreed that real consumer protection reforms were desirable in the financial services industry, they hated the creation of the CFPB, and they now intend to make sure that it has no independent enforcement authority. They have insisted on a set of ‘reforms’ that would give the CFPB exactly the same level of power to protect consumers from fraud in the financial markets that the Federal Election Commission exercises in protecting the American election campaign system from abuse. (If you think the FEC is doing an effective job, you’ll love the Republican version of consumer protection.) Their position is, we couldn’t get our way in the passage of Dodd-Frank, but now we’ll take a hostage to force the President to do our bidding. Hey Obama, you want to appoint a Director for the CFPB? First get the Democrats to make it toothless.

And of course, the burn-the-Reichstag gang is hard at work driving the nation to make catastrophic budget cuts or face the abyss of a default and consequent collapse of US creditworthiness.

Be clear. What we are witnessing from the right is not just ‘my way or the highway’ politics; nor is it the simple ‘politics of no.’ Indeed, by comparison mere obstructionism would be a wholesome development . Rather, the American right is demonstrating the nihilistic philosophy of the hostage taker: We will have our way or we will plunge us all into chaos.

On every issue, at every turn, the frothing eyespinners on the right (now known as the Republican base) have indicated a willingness to take the whole society over whatever cliff presents itself in order to get exactly what their ideology dictates.

Not happy with immigration law and unsatisfied with the limitations on your preferred xenophobic solutions imposed by provisions of the Constitution? No problem; propose a bill that circumvents the fundamental protections of the 14th Amendment. Can’t convince people to accept your alternate reality in which global climate change is conspiracy-hoax masterminded by Al Gore and that greenhouse gasses are just wholesome good ol’ CO₂? Don’t fret, just put up legislation to amend the Clean Air act to redefine the word “pollutant” so as to exclude “carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, or sulfur hexafluoride” from its meaning. Tired of five decades spent unsuccessfully trying to eviscerate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and enshrine a permanent preference for the rich? Easy! Wait for an opportune abyss into which to threaten to toss the American economy and hold out for ‘Cut, Cap, and Balance’!

How to explain this new romance on the right with the politics of hostage-taking? Oh c’mon! Does the goonsquad have to actually haul off a relative or two from your front door before you get the picture?

Our liberal friends have taken to calling recent Republican antics ‘maximalist.’ Well… sure…‘Maximalist’ in this context does refer to the practice of using radical means to secure a social or political goal in its entirety.

However…

While this is fine as far as it goes, it does not account for the current ideological absolutism of the right. Theirs is an interconnected set of political and social beliefs beyond the reach of critical thought, principled relativization, or even empirical tests.

So, see it for what it is and stop being surprised by their imperviousness to facts and their detachment from reality: Their rapture has already come. They are no longer among us; they have left our plane of existence to inhabit a new and exalted time and space apart from the mere world.

There is no uncertainty among the Bachmannesque rightwing, no room for profaning the pure with pragmatic doubt. Thus there can be no negotiation with holders of heterodox perspectives from the pure ideal, no quarter to be given to traitors on their own side who would compromise their absolute truth in order to make the concessions needed in the political processes of democracy.

Political maximalism wed to ideological absolutism is called totalitarianism. Rightwing totalitarianism has long been known as fascism. Remember the deranged and gun-toting thugs who terrorized townhall meetings during healthcare ‘death-panel’ summer. We should not have been surprised to find that the right has taken every opportunity to render the nation ungovernable when majority control is in the hands of the center-left.

Do not be surprised by the degree of rage on the right after the 2012 elections weaken Republican control of the House and would seem to strengthen the hand of the reelected president. We were warned in 2010 about “second amendment remedies” that could follow frustration at the polls.

If history is any guide, uniform-clad civilian groups bearing nationalist insignia are likely to follow.

1. Don’t worry though, certainly the same market forces and self-interested restraints that provided self-regulation of the financial markets in the 2008 will keep your next airplane trip safe and secure.

2. Unquestionably he best measure to come out of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation (maybe the only truly effective reform made in the wake of the devastating collapse of America’s plutocapitalist economy of the Bush era). The CFPB could, if it survives the Republican onslaught be the best financial services refrom since FDIC.