Circling the Drain

If you haven't read Paul Krugman's column to then you should hop on over and do so. It covers the state of our decline and the reasons and while it is a little depressing it spells out clearly the outlook for our country if the GOP continues to keep its strangle hold on the U.S. Senate. The Republicans have clearly lost all interest in working in the best interests of the nation or even in participating in a dialogue about how to address the myriad ills that are afflicting us. What is truly disheartening is that the Democrats are letting them get away with it and the GOP is not paying any political price to destroy the nation. It's quite scary:

And with the national G.O.P. having abdicated any responsibility for making things work, it’s only natural that individual senators should feel free to take the nation hostage until they get their pet projects funded.

The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.

Don’t hold your breath. As it is, Democrats don’t even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents’ obstructionism.

It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis. But by now, we know how the Obama administration deals with those who would destroy it: it goes straight for the capillaries. Sure enough, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, accused Mr. Shelby of “silliness.” Yep, that will really resonate with voters.

Now the White House is talking up a confab with the GOP on health care reform for the end of February.The GOP has already made it abundantly clear that they are not going to support anything on the Obama agenda, nothing, nada, nil. The current HCR bills before Congress both have all kinds of GOP driven goodies like tax cuts, no public option, deficit reduction and they still don't support it. What else can the Dems give away? The Republicans don't want any bill period and all they care about is Obama failing regardless if that means taking the rest of the country down with him. The GOP is counting on their noise machine and the ignorance of a majority of voters make their poisonous program one without political consequences.