Timothy Noah over at The New Republic writes this morning:
“The GOP’s desire to lose its House majority and re-elect President Obama is quite a thing to behold. After getting whupped in December over their reluctance to extend the payroll tax cut, Republican extremists in the House are once again holding it up with partisan demands (for instance, to cut unemployment insurance).”
Mr. Noah concludes that the Republicans have lost their political instincts, a fair point, but one that I think ducks the truth for the GOP is no longer about politics in the conventional sense. Ideology trumps politics just as paper wraps stone, and for much of the past decade the rightward tilt of the Republican party has been driven by what I like to call “the King Lear effect”–like the old king, the party divided its idea of posterity rather than thinking about the nation. The latter represents politics and the former is, well, not much more than opportunism. It took the Obama administration a long time to figure this out. No one wants to believe the old king is mad and his offspring are simply heartless, but that is the state of affairs.
Planet of the Blind 