Tea Party conservative Republicans like Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Ted Cruz (Texas) are nothing more than a racist "clavern of sociopaths" who are eager to saddle the country's first black president with a default on the nation's debt. That was the latest foaming-at-the-mouth bile from ultra-liberal Daily Beast's contributor Michael Tomasky this morning.
"Clavern," of course, is not a real word, but "klavern" is the term the KKK uses to refer to one of its local chapters. Of course, Tomasky would have to conduct a seance to talk to the last member of the U.S. Senate who knew what a klavern was from person experience -- former Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) -- and the only black member of the U.S. Senate is conservative Republican Tim Scott (S.C.) -- a staunch opponent of ObamaCare -- but those inconvenient facts don't fit Tomasky's simplistic boil-everything-down-to-Republican-racism narrative (emphasis mine)
Assuming the House passes the Reid-McConnell bill, the Senate would still have to pass it, too. And to pass it by midnight October 17, senators would have to do so on an expedited calendar. To expedite the calendar in the Senate requires something called unanimous consent, and unanimous means unanimous.
Will Cruz and Lee agree? I am so sick and tired of trying to get inside these psychotic people’s brains that I can’t even complete this paragraph. Who knows.
This is the worst it’s ever been in modern America. But it is going to get worse. They aren’t going to stop hating Obama and Obamacare. They aren’t suddenly going to decide to make their peace with him or it. They sure aren’t going to decide that gee, using default as leverage is naughty. A big chunk of them want the United States to default on Obama’s watch, so they can then blame him for what they themselves caused, say, “The black guy wrecked the economy. Couldn’t you have predicted it?” New horrors await us that you and I, being normal people, can’t begin to dream up. But rest assured, they will.
[Keep in mind this was posted early this morning, well before Sen. Cruz elected to not stand in the way of unanimous consent on the Senate floor to the Reid-McConnell deal.]
On an equally shrill note, Tomasky also compared the debt ceiling showdown to the damage done the country by the Watergate crisis (emphasis mine):
This is a sad and sickening spectacle, like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life. Not as bad as Watergate, you say? I beg to differ. However this turns out—and there were reports as I was writing Tuesday night that the House might finally run up the white flag here—this has been in its way worse than Watergate. Watergate ultimately vindicated our system against the machinations of one sociopath. It took time, because he was a president. But even he ultimately observed democratic norms and, when cornered, did the honorable thing.
It was the very next paragraph in which Tomasky subtly worked racism into his piece, so as to build to his inevitable far-from-subtle conclusion:
Today, we have a clavern of sociopaths who know nothing of honor, and we have no easy way to stop them. Except at the ballot box. Except that they’ve rigged that, too, with their House districts. They’ve rigged the whole game so that they light the match and then point at President Obama and shout: “Look! Fire!” And overseeing it all is House Speaker John Boehner, as of Tuesday officially the worst high-ranking elected officer in the history of the United States.
