Their Real Goal: To Make Us All So Cynical About Government, We Give Up

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

An old friend who has been active in politics for more than thirty years tells me he’s giving up. “I can’t stomach what’s going on in Washington anymore,” he says. “The hell with all of them. I have better things to do with my life.”

My friend is falling exactly into the trap that the extreme right wants all of us to fall into — such disgust and cynicism that we all give up on politics. Then they’re free to take over everything.

Republicans blame the shutdown of Washington and possible default on the nation’s debt on the President’s “unwillingness to negotiate” over the Affordable Care Act. But that law has already been negotiated. It passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by the President. It withstood a Supreme Court challenge.

The Act is hardly perfect, but neither was Social Security or Medicare when first enacted. The Constitution allows Congress to amend or delay laws that don’t work as well as they were intended, or even to repeal them. But to do any of this requires new legislation – including a majority of both houses of Congress and a president’s signature (or else a vote to override a president’s veto).

http://robertreich.org/#.UlOP-QeJLeg.twitter

[gopiscrap]

1. Seems that way

[blkmusclmachine]

2. .

.

[octoberlib]

3. Yep.

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters


Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy.


http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/3079:goodbye-to-all-that-reflections-of-a-gop-operative-who-left-the-cult

[dkf]

4. Isn't this simply incorrect? Obama DID delay parts without congressional approval.

[Jim Warren]

5. Thanks for the heads up on this

I do think it would have been more effective to include that it was from R Reich in the subject line.......just to let folks know what informed (former) DC wonks are thinking.

[Cha]

6. Well, it's not working.