The circus is coming to town. First hint? The elephants are lining up for the parade into the?Big Tent Capitol early next year. The 114th Congress is simply littered with ideologues/demagogues, revival tent preachers, born again politicians, right-wing reactionaries, thugs, anarchists, war mongers, in other words: clowns. Ok, so they are possibly dangerous clowns; but, they are not exactly performing a high wire act without a net. That is the part they are forcing on President Obama.
The next Congress is going to be a show stopper. Greatest Show on Earth is political theater and like the showman himself P.T. Barnum may have once said:
?There is a sucker born every minute.?
Who are the suckers? I don’t have to tell you. The election isn’t even a week old. The suckers are the voters who decided to send folks Cory Gardner R-CO, Joni Ernst R-IA, Tom Cotton R-AR, Thom Tillis R-NC, James Lankford R-OK, and those are just the really nutty ones. They will join Ted Cruz R-TX, Jeff Flake R-AZ, James Inhofe R-OK, Mike Lee R- UT and others we have come to know and so not love. And it is no better in the House.
So step right up and keep your eyes focused on the center ring. You will be amazed by the colossal chutzpah of the Ringleaders the Senate Majority Leader and Speaker of the House as they crack their whips and give us all one big simultaneous headache. Will they shut down the government over the debt ceiling while scaring the electorate into believing that this doesn’t mean just paying our bills? Will they seek to use Christian prayer to bend the government to their will, vow to stop the government entirely? Or like Grover Norquist, a man who has held no political office in his life, spout views that pretty much scream anarchy. He once said, “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” He then went on to strong-arm the Republican caucus into signing his pledge to never, ever, raise taxes.
Ok. So I am an unabashed fan of Aaron Sorkin, who wrote this for his HBO series, Newsroom:
“The Tea Party believes in loving America, but hating Americans. They believe in loving America, but hating its government. And one other plank in the Tea Party platform: If you’re poor, it means you’re either too lazy or too stupid to be rich… Ideological purity. Compromise as weakness. A fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism. Denying science. Unmoved by facts. Undeterred by new information. A hostile fear of progress. A demonization of a education. A need to control women’s bodies. Severe xenophobia. Tribal mentality. Intolerance of dissent and a pathological hatred of the U.S. government. They can call themselves the Tea Party, they can call themselves conservatives and they can even call themselves Republicans, though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. We should call them what they are: The American Taliban. Step right up.”
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