"Constitutional idolatry and boundless bellicosity"
by digby
I cannot tell you how much I like this Rolling Stone piece by Jeb Lund. He's writing about Tom Cotton, whom he describes as looking "appropriately like Anthony Perkins in Psycho" (God, does he ever...) but which is really about the Republican Party. There is a lot of great history in the piece about Republican foreign policy that is just so ... great. But this, this says it all:
Critics who leapt on Cotton and his 46 fellow clowns for "treason" for violating Nixon's nemesis, the Logan Act, were so close to getting the point. To read most analyses, Cotton engaged in an act of political grandstanding that went too far and undermined the faith and function of the United States. It's a judgment that relies on the begged question that Cotton even remotely gives a shit about that. He doesn't. Undermining the United States' function as it is presently constituted is a feature, not a bug.
The American Republic has always been a fundamentally screwheaded experiment in the perversion of democracy, empowering property as much as people, while aggregating people in distorted non-representative territories to diminish their leverage on power. And that's just in one branch of government. At the same time, it structured the two active branches – the legislature and executive – to be mutual antagonists, glossing such an instantly sclerotic system as a check against tyranny when a look at the early conditions for the franchise reveal a much more profound check against any momentum from great mass of human beings within its domain. Tom Cotton likes that just fine. Anything like the smooth, responsive performance of a parliamentary democracy is anathematized by Cotton and his ilk because it is theoretically possible for them to, at some point, lose power.
To be fair, a large portion of this fondness for a non-functioning government stems from the president being a black Democrat, but stopping there imputes solely a racial motive to a comprehensive and enduring contempt for government's existence at all. Holding government hostage over the debt ceiling again and again, holding it hostage over a Homeland Security bill, holding a knife to its throat over Iran – these are just elaborations on a theme from the 1990s. Back then, Cotton's fellow travelers and their predecessors shut down the government when it was run by a self-made white bubba from Cotton's own Arkansas, a guy who embodied the American dream about as much as anyone can, a drawling southern burger-fiend who liked chicks with big hair. The point wasn't who was running the government, but that someone was trying to run it in the first place.
In its Constitutional idolatry and boundless bellicosity, Cotton's Republican Party has arrogated to itself the presumption that anything it does is explicitly American. The normative conditions of patriotism are whatever they want to do at any given moment, because only they have the courage to defend you from enemies abroad with guns and enemies at home via a fundamentalist reading of the texts and hadith of Our Founding Prophets (which, conveniently, also mentions guns). Anything outside their chosen agenda is met with the word no, which is the finest distillation of their agenda for anyone other than their own. [emphasis mine]
Read on, I beg you. Yes, they do want war. Of course. Always.
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