It’s likely that most NewsBusters readers are familiar with the grimly humorous saying “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” Last Friday, UCLA professor of public policy Mark Kleiman opined in so many words that the Republican party’s beatings in presidential elections will continue until its mental health improves.
In a Friday Washington Monthly post, Kleiman mocked conservatives for their allegedly fanciful belief that their “frivolous” arguments in King v. Burwell would carry the day and predicted that Republicans probably have a few more years of delusion and defeat ahead of them: “It’s possible that a convincing [Hillary] Clinton win and a Democratic recapture of the Senate in 2016 will shock the GOP back to reality. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Feeding right-wing fury is a profitable venture financially, and it works well enough electorally in off-years to keep the hustle going. My guess is that it will take a Clinton re-election landslide in 2020 to do the job.”
From Kleiman’s post (bolding added):
If you, like me, have a twisted sense of humor and limited compassion, it’s rather funny to see all the Republican politicians and conservative pundits decompensating in the face of the rather predictable outcome of King v. Burwell.
Not that it’s unreasonable for them to be disappointed that the court didn’t once again make up legal principles out of whole cloth in order to serve right-wing prejudices and policy preferences. But the reaction isn’t the “Well, it was worth a try” that might be expected when a long-shot didn’t come in. It’s sheer uncomprehending grief and outrage. Instead of saying “Too bad, I guess John Roberts decided he couldn’t stretch reality far enough to let us win this one,” the right wing is saying “John Roberts betrayed us! He was never really a conservative!”
More than anything else, it reminds me of Karl Rove on Election Night 2012, insisting that Barack Obama hadn’t really have carried Ohio…
…This time, they’d convinced themselves that the fundamentally frivolous challenge in King -- asserting that the Congress had deliberately set up Obamacare to fail -- was obviously valid…
So when John Roberts, in effect, called “bullsh*t,” Fox News viewers, including the pols and the professional chatterers, were utterly blindsided, and reacted by insisting that the problem was with Roberts rather than with the plaintiffs’ case.
In a purely partisan sense, it’s an advantage for Democrats to be running against a fundamentally unhinged party. But from a patriotic viewpoint, the realization that the country no longer has two political parties that can be trusted with the reins of government is pretty damned scary. It’s possible that a convincing Clinton win and a Democratic recapture of the Senate in 2016 will shock the GOP back to reality. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Feeding right-wing fury is a profitable venture financially, and it works well enough electorally in off-years to keep the hustle going. My guess is that it will take a Clinton re-election landslide in 2020 to do the job.
FYI, last Wednesday, Kleiman tweeted, “During the Civil Rights movement, ‘conservative’ meant ‘anti-black.’ Despite the sudden enlightenment of pols on the right, it still does.”
