Send in the Grown-Ups

Don’t bother to send in the clowns. They’re here. What we need are the adults.

For the past twenty years, I’ve been predicting a schism in the Republican party–or at the very least, a “smack down” of the extremists on the right by the establishment-types (aka the “country club” Republicans).

I was so certain the day of reckoning was close that I hung in as the GOP got weirder and wilder–reluctant to leave a party to which I’d given so many years, and unable to make sense of the zealots who’d displaced the rational, prudent folks I had worked with for so long.

But the day of reckoning never came, and in 2000 I left–or more accurately, I acknowledged that the party had left me. I watched from the sidelines as the GOP continued its seemingly inexorable trip into Tea Party fantasyland. I kept expecting the people who occupy reality and care about the party’s long-term prospects–the people whose own interests are tied to the viability of the national organization– to step in and say “enough.”

It never happened.

As Jon Lovett recently wrote in The Atlantic,

The Republican elite caught a ride on the tiger. But the tiger got sick of waiting for the gazelles it was promised, the gazelles that were always one election away. The tiger was hungry and angry and tired of being used and the longer it waited the more appetizing the elite on its back became. So the tiger got a radio station and a news channel. The tiger got organized and mobilized. And finally the tiger realized it didn’t need someone kicking its sides telling it which way to run and who to eat and when to eat and why it wasn’t time to eat and the time to eat would come, don’t worry, you’ll eat soon enough.

So the tiger ate its master and now here we are.

If the recent disastrous behavior of the so-called “suicide caucus” doesn’t finally precipitate the appropriate response by the sane remnant, nothing ever will.

When GOP figures like John McCain and Peter King (Peter King, for heaven’s sake!) place blame for the shutdown and the damage it caused squarely on the crazy caucus–when The Economist (hardly a leftwing organ) profiles Ted Cruz as a pandering “Cruz missile” promising the impossible and doing real damage to his fellow Republicans–when Michelle Bachmann (who welcomes the damage as a sign of the “End Times”) and Louis Gohmert (who threatened to impeach the President if Congress caused default) remain the face of the GOP along with the feckless John Boehner…

Surely it’s time for the grown-ups?

If any grown-ups are left…..

4 Comments

  1. My voting habits for years consisted of picking and choosing between parties for the candidate I thought would do the best job on certain issues. My primary choice during those years were Republicans and I worked in the Indianaolis Republican administrations beginning in 1972 under Lugar, proudly through the Bill Hudnut years, till the stress of the Goldsmith administration aided in destroying my health, rendering me totally disabled. I then began leaning more toward the Democratic party; living in Florida when Bush was NOT elected ended my picking and choosing voting habit. I am saddened and angry that the current GOP has forced me into the position of voting against any and all candidates as I try to rid all levels of government of any of them in an effort to protect this country. The late night, last minute vote in the House on Wednesday proved there are still some intelligent, thinking, logical, rational Republicans to be found – in hiding till this country is on the brink of destruction. I will continue voting for the Democratic party till the likes of Boehner, Ryan, Cruz, Bachman, Palin, “The Donald”, et al, are gone from the political scene. After the past months it is difficult to keep the profanity from my postings; of course these profane words, names and phrases running through my mind are all protected under the 1st Amendment:) All we can do at this point in America’s history is to hope and pray the voters remember and actually understand what we have been needlessly – and expensively – put through by the GOP and their monied supporters.

  2. Let’s be grown-ups and move on with our lives and the status quo we need to deal with regarding the unending childishness of the GOP. PLEASE…never mention that un-news channel again. In my mind, any more attention to that group only gives them free public relations. I just could not add this comment to that blog with 75 others:) Forgive me?

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