Tea Party Purges and Departures

“History repeats itself,” Karl Marx proclaimed, “first as tragedy then as farce.”

The Tea Party is now acting out a pathetic parody of Communism’s Great Terror of the 1930s in the name of ideological purity and for the same reason, paranoid fear of losing control over true believers.

In the fiscal cliff’s shadow, House Republicans remove from key committees two conservatives deemed insufficiently dedicated to the party line (the Paul Ryan budget) as a warning to others who might be tempted to deviate. Is Eric Cantor tuning up his act as the Tea Party’s tinpot Stalin?

Even more suggestive is a miffed departure from the movement by Dick Armey, the former House majority leader who is considered its philosophical father going back to the Contract with America days of the 1990s.

Co-author of the “Tea Party Manifesto,” Armey now resigns from its key organization FreedomWorks with thinly veiled annoyance.

"Obviously I was not happy with the election results," he explains in his non-explanation. "We might've gotten better results if we had gone in a different direction...we should've done better."

Translation: The kooks have taken over, and the Tea Party’s own Karl Marx is picking up his marbles and going home to Texas, directing that all his stuff, including his “official Congressional portrait” be sent there.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, JFK nailed this kind of scurrying around. “Victory,” he observed, “has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.”

As the White House turns away with disdain from a GOP budget “offer,” its proponents are showing internal signs of disarray signaling that the Tea Party may soon be over.

Beginning of Boehner's Long Goodbye

All this has to end with tears, the Speaker’s tanned face crinkling with self-pity as he steps down from high office never imagined by a boy who swept out his grandfather’s saloon.

Unlike his GOP predecessor Tom DeLay, John Boehner will be brought down not by corruption but ideological crossfire between a now-liberated President and an immovable Tea Party caucus led by his own Iago.

Eric Cantor’s ambition to succeed Boehner will dovetail nicely with Paul Ryan’s 2016 hopes to make the Speaker an inevitable sacrificial victim of the fiscal cliff battle, which can only end with their followers’ resentment, if not unhappiness.

Some without pity may shrug at the irony, mindful of Boehner’s arrogance during the previous debt-ceiling crisis when he turned away from a possible Grand Bargain to humiliate the President.

Now with a Barack Obama who never again has to face voters, the leverage is all his, with surrogates confirming their determination to raise taxes.

When all this plays out, John Boehner will be standing alone in the GOP ruins to take the blame and eventually step down.

Hard to believe, but what follows him will be worse until 2014 but could end with Democrats taking back the House and making Republican internal struggles moot.

No matter what, we are seeing the beginning of Boehner’s long goodbye to real power.  Perhaps sooner rather than later, he will be out of sight unless he chooses to join DeLay on "Dancing With the Stars."

 

Republicans' Arrested Development

When one of my grandkids was four, we played ferocious card games. He took losing hard, even after I pointed out that if he always won no one would play with him.

He is a young man now with a decided gift for nuanced political analysis, but Congressional GOP members seem stuck where he was then, bent on winning at all costs and oblivious to the give-and-take of mature negotiation.

A few who signed Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge in knee-pants are re-thinking a position that amounts to holding your breath until you get your way, but the vast majority are still suffering from the kind of arrested development that gridlocked Barack Obama’s first term and threatens to carry over into the second.

That’s why in his Weekly Address the President tells voters “it’s unacceptable for some Republicans in Congress to hold middle class tax cuts hostage simply because they refuse to let tax rates go up on the wealthiest Americans. And if you agree with me, then I could use your help. Let your congressman know what $2,000 means to you. Give them a call. Write them an email. Or tweet them using the hashtag ‘My2K.’”

In short, tell them to grow up and get serious.

Norquist is predicting renewed success with threatening to deprive GOP lawmakers of dessert at the ballot box, but the President seems to have something more adult in mind as he tries to fold new economic stimulus into his dealings with Congress.

John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, get out of the playpen and meet my grandson.

Tower of Babble at the Cliff

American disarray is becoming Biblical in the “confusion of tongues” at the fiscal cliff. The builders of the nation’s future seem cursed by inability to find a common language.

Boehner’s gang rejects the President’s proposal as “completely unbalanced and unreasonable” while beyond the Wall Street Journal paywall Mitch McConnell rants about tearing up the social safety net.

Wasn’t there a recent national election in which the people spoke, if not with one voice, clearly enough to set an agenda?  In a tour to keep that momentum going, the President tells workers at a toy factory about the GOP’s holding middle-class tax cuts hostage to preserve those of the rich:

“I’ve been keeping my own naughty and nice list for Washington. That’s sort of like the lump of coal you get for Christmas. That’s a Scrooge Christmas...

“The reason I’m here is because I want the American people to urge Congress soon in the next week the next two weeks to begin the work we have by doing what we all agree on. Both parties agree that we should extend the middle-class tax cuts.

“I want you to call, I want you to send an e-mail, post on their Facebook wall.”

In these times, the social media may be the best hope for magnifying the voice of the people with messages that can’t be misunderstood. Tweets and e-mail can heighten the telegrams and telephone calls of yore that conveyed the mood beyond Washington.

Meanwhile, conservative cheerleaders keep urging their Congressional heroes to stay the course:

“The GOP's message this week to the Dems can be summed up in two words: Grow up. Only after the president has definitively shown that the Democrats prefer the politics of adolescence should the GOP begin passing out parachutes for the group jump over the cliff.”

In how many languages can they say “Geronimo?”