In mid-July, The Huffington Post announced it would cover Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as entertainment news. Lefty pundit Paul Waldman might like that policy extended to GOPers in general, since he thinks they’re more about sound-and-fury theatrics than ideas or legislative accomplishments.
“Today's Republicans,” wrote Waldman in a Sunday American Prospect column, “truly have created not just a politics of anger, but a politics utterly removed from any substance at all. Policy goals may be the nominal justification for all the anger, but in truth nobody bothers figuring out how they might be achieved. The performance is its own end.”
Waldman singled out Ted Cruz, whom he described as “not a legislator, [but] a performer, a kind of right-wing version of the Code Pink activists who disrupt Capitol Hill hearings…So it's no accident that many House Republicans look to him as a mentor when they're considering shutting down the government — another bit of political performance art that inevitably gains conservatives nothing, as long as you're thinking about the goals they claim to espouse.”
From Waldman’s post (bolding added):
These days, conservatives have to take their victories where they can find them. After all, the Affordable Care Act is still the law of the land, gay people are getting married, our noble job creators suffer under the tortuous and unjust burden of high marginal income tax rates, the government continues to provide food stamps to layabouts who think their children ought to eat, immigrants walk amongst us speaking strange and indecipherable tongues, and worst of all, that usurper Barack Obama strolls into the Oval Office every day like he's the president or something.
…So it was when Marco Rubio told attendees at the Values Voter Summit on Friday that Speaker of the House John Boehner had announced his resignation, and was met with whoops and cheers lasting a full 30 seconds. I couldn't help wondering: What exactly do they think is going to happen now? Is there any way that Boehner's departure makes it more likely that any of the things conservatives say they want will actually come to pass?
Today's Republicans…truly have created not just a politics of anger, but a politics utterly removed from any substance at all. Policy goals may be the nominal justification for all the anger, but in truth nobody bothers figuring out how they might be achieved. The performance is its own end.
…Cruz is not a legislator, he's a performer, a kind of right-wing version of the Code Pink activists who disrupt Capitol Hill hearings…So it's no accident that many House Republicans look to him as a mentor when they're considering shutting down the government — another bit of political performance art that inevitably gains conservatives nothing, as long as you're thinking about the goals they claim to espouse…
…[N]o one has done more to thwart Barack Obama over the last seven years than Mitch McConnell has…Tea Partiers hate him not because he's some kind of moderate compromiser, but because he's realistic about what is and isn't possible — and because he isn't shy about expressing his dislike for ultra-conservative members of Congress…
…[T]o repeat the question I asked earlier, what do they think is going to happen now? If the next speaker of the House is conservative enough, will that mean Barack Obama will suddenly start signing all the ridiculous bills the House passes? Of course he won't.
