For 30 years, one of the dominating themes of the Republican Party has been an almost fetish-like aversion to taxes. The single individual responsible for this reckless, irresponsible meme has been trust-fund baby and otherwise useless tool Grover Norquist.
The overall purpose of Norquist's anti-tax movement has been to "starve the beast;" i.e., force a radical reduction in social spending that Republicans do not like by intentionally unbalancing the budget, and then pointing to social programs as the cause. This is because the GOP found out early on that broadcasting their intent to kill Social Security and Medicare almost invariably led to electoral disaster.
So, being dishonest scum like they are, the GOP decided to create a phony crisis and use it as an excuse to kill the programs they can't openly talk the American public out of.
It's a long game and it was always doomed to fail. Now, it is going to destroy the GOP utterly.
For decades, Republicans have been busily ruining our nation's financial health. If you listen to their rhetoric, really listen, you can tell that this has not been at all accidental. It has been deliberate. They've wrapped themselves so deeply around their dishonest rhetoric that they can now call a plan that cuts taxes on the wealthy and offsets them with cuts in social spending a "balanced budget" even though it is nothing of the kind.
It has forced Republicans into circular arguments, and ultimately into denying well-known facts, in order to continue to justify their draconian assaults on the middle class.
And it has finally backed these dishonest assholes into a corner. Republicans govern by fear. We all remember the Medicare scare that the GOP tried to pull while we were busy reforming healthcare. Now, the GOP has gone about-face and is trying to KILL GRANNY, quite literally. We all know that private insurance is only for the wealthy and healthy. We all know that once deprived of their guaranteed benefits, our senior citizens will see significantly shorter and less enjoyable retirement years.
We all know this. We should not at all be afraid of calling the GOP out on it.
What I find amusing about this is in order to become so extreme that they could openly execute the end-game of Starve the Beast, the GOP had to purge intelligent and sane people from their ranks. Grover Norquist is neither intelligent nor sane. His ideas are that of an unhinged, uneducated, ignorant and selfish extremist. By bullying out of the party any Republican who doesn't sign his mendacious pledges to not raise taxes, Norquist has actively participated in the further radicalization of his movement out of the American mainstream.
For decades the GOP has quietly held the opinion that we should end Medicare and Social Security, and they've gotten away with it by not actually doing anything about that. They thought, once confronted with the insane budget crisis they've caused for us, that the public would join with them in "fiscal responsibilityland" and with a privatization magic pony, we'd just get rid of all those nasty social programs.
It is apparent that Norquist has the chess-playing skills of a toddler. After having worked tirelessly for decades putting his master game in play, he fucking forgot that all of the players on OUR side are marble kings and queens, and all of the players on his side are wooden-headed pawns. His endgame has been a disaster, and it hasn't even been half a year since it kicked into gear and his party is already losing seats. The public has awakened, we sleeping giants, and we're going to take this country back from the GOP.
And I am really curious how much power they can hold after this. After seeing how massively unpopular their ideas are, they are apparently doubling down on the crazy, and no GOP candidate is going to make it to the Presidential race without an affirmation of the Paul Ryan budget. Meaning they are going to have, as their public face, their most prominent representative, someone who robotically supports the Ryan plan in the face of all rational evidence.
I want to make this one hurt. I want it to hurt the GOP so badly that they never recover. I want to make sure that we, the American public, make an example out of this party. So that the next corporate-whorehouse party that gets put up in their place fucking knows better than to screw with the American voter.
And Grover Norquist can suck it.