Boehner Defiantly Rationalizes GOP Madness, as Stephanopoulos Presses for Shutdown End Game Strategy (video)

A week ago, Republican grandstanding in the House of Representatives shutdown the US government. Saying they want to “save the American people from the threat of Obamacare” Tea Party anarchists are risking the health and welfare of millions of Americans, our standing as a world leader, and our financial health as a nation, as they stall budget negotiations. This is beyond unconscionable. It is traitorous.

Bankrolled by the Koch Brothers and a handful of capitalists bent on denying affordable health care to millions of Americans, Republicans in the House of Representatives continue to use double speak lie to cloud the issues and deflect blame for this dangerous brinksmanship away from themselves.

From Esquire…

We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation’s insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson’s account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

This is what they came to Washington to do — to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouthbreathing base.

Their rhetoric is so far from the truth that it is shocking. While they are trying to “save” the US from health insurance, millions of Americans are signing up for Obamacare (AKA the Affordable Care Act). In the first three days, 8.6 million unique users logged on to Healthcare.gov to shop the health insurance exchanges.

Is the Tea Party the New Confederacy? Are they truly anarchists, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid suggested? Or are they just so incompetent that they dazzle themselves with their own brilliance, as Paul Krugman suggested in today’s New York Times? Quoting the Mann-Ornstein book “It’s Even Worse than It Looks,” he writes:

G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

But there’s one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect — the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence — reigns supreme…

It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.

Watch House Speaker John Boehner’s arrogant ignorance at work in this video interview with George Stephanopoulos. He repeatedly asks  Boehner where this will all end and why he refuses to allow a vote on a “clean” continuing resolution on the budget. A defiant Boehner repeatedly says he can’t bring a “clean CR” up for a vote because it won’t pass. (Prove it.) He couldn’t care less about the hardship that Republican Party is inflicting on our country and potentially the world. Where are Senator John McCain and other more moderate Republican silverbacks? Someone needs to take Boehner aside and tell him “game over.”