Republicans’ private terror: Why they despise the modern American state — and embrace fanaticism

[DonViejo]

That letter to Iran said more about the GOP than Tom Cotton and company ever intended. Here's their demented logic

KIM MESSICK

As I write this, more than a week has passed since 47 Republican senators decided the leaders of Iran needed an American civics class. Their March 9 letter moved from the relatively arcane– how to distinguish treaties from “executive-congressional agreements” and both from “mere executive agreements”– to the comparatively straightforward: presidents come and go, the Republicans observed, but senators can last forever. (Or at least for “decades.”) Their lessons imparted, the 47 (can it be long before a movie tells their story in the fashion of “300”?) wished “clarity” upon the mullahs and signed off, doubtless to prepare their next text — a postcard on the Federalist Papers, perhaps, or an email on the blessings (or the curse) of judicial review. The latter, it goes without saying, will not be issued until the Supreme Court rules on the latest Obamacare case.

Denunciations were immediate and thunderous, most of them from Democrats, of course, but some from that increasingly endangered species variously identified as “establishment” or “mainstream” Republicans. (A species on a double-edged sword of extinction, because not only is it subject to constant predation, it has given up any effort to reproduce!) All of them decried the letter as utterly unprecedented, which forgets only the other utterly unprecedented moves by congressional Republicans, such as John Boehner’s decision a week earlier to turn the floor of the House into a mosh pit for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Whether or not the Senate’s pedagogical moment was inspired by the example of their House colleagues— a pincer movement! a tag-team event! a double whammy!— it certainly employed the same tactic: the use of a foreign power to shape the outcome of an American policy debate.

Much froth has been expended on the question of whether this constitutes “treason.” Even more has been devoted to theories about why Republicans do these things. Why the dalliance with Netanyahu? Why the love note to the Iranian right? Predictably, many commentators link these events to Republican hatred of President Obama. On MSNBC’s “Hardball,” for example, Chris Matthews depicted both as simply the right’s latest primal scream, a two-headed monster from the Republican id:

“Some day years from now people will look back on this presidency… They will read how it started with the Republican Senate leader calling for the president’s defeat, declaring that the business of the opposition from the first day was to ensure the new president (a) accomplishes nothing and (b) gets booted from office as quickly as possible. They will… wonder what was it that made this Republican opposition so all out contemptuous of an American president…. They will… perhaps get the idea that the age of Jim Crow managed to find a new habitat in the early 21st century Republican Party.”

full article
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/19/republicans_private_terror_why_they_despise_the_modern_american_state_and_embrace_fanaticism/

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1. It's called Christian reconstructionism.

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2. Pic URL: https://thatsmyphilosophy.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/7-mountains.jpg