QOTD: Greg Sargent
by digby
It’s now become accepted as normal that Republicans will threaten explicitly to allow harm to the country to get what they want, and will allow untold numbers of Americans to be hurt rather than even enter into negotiations over the sort of compromises that lie at the heart of basic governing.
That's from an excellent piece about how the Republicans are sabotaging the roll out of Obamacare, which he correctly surmises is being done for cynical electoral purposes. (I think they also want to build a consensus among the people that it's made things worse in order to chip away at the parts of the law that benefit those they believe are undeserving.)
He also quotes Chuck Todd at length, who seems to have had an epiphany about his erstwhile GOP friends. Apparently, the political establishment is waking up to the fact that just because Obama passed health care reform, there was no guarantee that it would be implemented as passed. And they are realizing that looking to past implementations of major progressive legislation doesn't really tell you much in an era of extreme right wing radicalism.
This is not news to everyone. Some of us realized that we were dealing with people who had become unmoored from any consciousness of the need to govern. The problem is --- what now?
Check out this piece by Jonathan Bernstein on how the GOP strong-armed the NFL not to participate in any Obamacare education campaign. Sheer thuggery. But that's not new. They have been doing this stuff for quite a while now. It's just that the establishment refused to believe what they were seeing with their own eyes.
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