Over at Political Animal - Washington Monthly, Nancy LeTourneau picks up on an observation made by Rachel Maddow to comment on a story that will leave you shaking your head in disbelief. The observation is summed up in two words: post-policy. What it essentially means is, Republicans have abandoned any real commitment to actually carrying out policies; all that matters is political positioning.
The example is:
...A Republican congressman intended to work on a public policy he and his party take seriously, but ended up getting nothing done – failing to even write a bill – because some far-right conspiracy theories popped up, which necessarily meant actual policymaking was pushed to the backburner.
As Jonathan Bernstein put it, “Couldn’t write a bill because he was distracted by Fast and Furious and Benghazi? Why not just say that his computer was down or that a dog ate his homework? At least those cliched excuses don’t imply what is really going on here: Republican politicians who believed that the job of a member of Congress is to be outraged, and once they’ve done that, they can pretty much go home.”
To pull up another example, consider Chris Christie's Very Serious Plan to deal with the Ebola threat from returning health workers.
Via Talking Points Memo,
...this piece just published by NJ.com which suggests that Christie simply never implemented the policy. But not before finding an abandoned psychiatric hospital, Hagedorn Psychiatric Hospital, in Hunterdon Country where asymptomatic health care workers returning from West Africa would be confined - and not before racking up 500 hours of police overtime hours to guard the abandoned facility even though no one was there.
The police guard at the empty facility apparently ended on Wednesday. Had anyone actually shown symptoms of Ebola infection they would not have been sent to Hagerdorn but one of three state hospitals designated for handling Ebola patients.
And of course, there's the Very Serious effort by the House Intelligence Committee that spent two years investigating what actually went wrong in Benghazi, in order to come up with policies to ensure it would never happen again.
Or maybe not... But in any case,
Lindsey Graham is not going to give up pursuing the truth
Now this isn't to say Republicans have abandoned their core policies - make the rich richer, take and hold power at any cost, and screw everyone else. It just means they have no interest in doing anything with government beyond that agenda; it's all about keeping up appearances for the marks and rubes at their snake oil medicine show.
Post-Policy... Because if you don't really believe in using government to do anything for ordinary people or solve problems that don't affect you personally, who needs policy when marketing will do?