In his posts this past week on the shutdown/debt-ceiling uproar, Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas likened conservative Republicans to figures that included zombies, Charlie Sheen, and (of course) a terrorist. Let's plunge in.
On Monday, Moulitsas alleged that tea-partiers are lashing out in a crazed, mindless anti-Obama rage:
The only thing that mollifies that crowd is defeating a president they deem illegitimate. That's how a Heritage Foundation idea backed by Newt Gingrich and first implemented by a Republican governor becomes the second coming of Stalin. There's no nuance or logic or strategy or anything even resembling sanity. It's HULK SMASH over and over again. Like zombies, their hunger is insatiable. So spending levels? They don't give a crap. They need something new to smash. Or a new brain to eat. Pick your favorite metaphor...
Wednesday brought Kos's claim that Republicans are like a bratty child: "You know that little kid at the mall, on the floor, kicking and screaming because he can't get the toy that he wants? You notice how little he cares that people are staring at him with open disgust? That's the modern GOP," and on Thursday he wrote that "as many have joked in recent days, the GOP is winning [on the shutdown] the way Charlie Sheen was winning."
On Friday morning, apropos of the Values Voter Summit, Moulitsas mused that the religious right often has violence on its mind (emphasis added):
Conservatives are suddenly fond of bleating about how this is a Republic blah blah blah minority rights blah blah blah. Yet in the House today, a majority supporting a clean continuing budget resolution can't get a vote.
But in any case, "minority rights" doesn't mean what they think it means: an equal voice in making decisions. Or even more accurately, "the right to have everything go my way otherwise the world economy GETS IT!"...
...[T]he Christian Right is inherently undemocratic—there is, after all, nothing more autocratic than the "word of God". And religious fundamentalists have no interest in compromising on their theology, whether their method of destruction is an AK-47 or a government shutdown...
A few hours later, Kos asserted that the GOP can't both repair its shutdown-damaged image and please its base (emphasis added):
Fact is, the government shutdown is being viewed through the lens of the Tea Party because they are responsible for it. It's true, the terrorist gets more attention than his victims...
Before [Republicans] can put any shutdown dysfunction in their rear view mirror they have to capitulate to Obama and the Democrats by providing a clean continuing budget resolution and a clean raising of the debt limit. And if they do that, the party's fringy base will explode, littering that "favorable playing field" with the debris of a once-vibrant national party...
