Hannibal’s gone, but there’s still plenty of horrifying content on television. Daily Beast pundit Ana Marie Cox hinted in a Monday column that some of it’s on C-SPAN, courtesy of congressional Republicans.
Regarding a possible government shutdown over funding for Planned Parenthood, Cox asserted, “Forget shrinking government to the size it can be drowned in a bathtub, the politicians clamoring for another shutdown want government done away with in the most gruesome manner possible—perhaps those Planned Parenthood videos are the inspiration for their actions in more ways than one.”
Cox concluded, “This coming shutdown is about the Republican Party’s position on Planned Parenthood, for sure. It’s also a statement about the Republican Party’s vision for how government should be used: punitively, or not at all. Their logic ties together almost the entire modern conservative platform, from gun rights to foreign policy: First, do harm.”
From Cox’s piece (bolding added):
The showdown over Planned Parenthood…is driven by a delusion just as radically unhinged as [GOP presidential candidates’] talk of autism epidemics and mass deportations…
…[John Boehner and Mitch McConnell] are both facing active rebellion over their wish to merely avoid massive disruption…But in the minds of the insurgents beneath them…government is a vehicle for revenge and retribution…
It says something about the ludicrousness of the situation that the only two major Republican presidential candidates to resist shutdown mania included the one whose policies put him the furthest distance from the GOP base (John Kasich) and the one whose policies seem not to matter to the GOP base (Donald Trump). On this one issue, they have created a rationality wormhole, connecting otherwise non-contiguous parts of the Republican party…
Can you even call what the anti-choice Republicans are doing now a “strategy”? It is budgetary terrorism more than a parliamentary gimmick; Democratic and Republican leaders both maintain that no budget that cuts off Planned Parenthood will pass with a veto-proof majority…
…[F]or all their bluster about their moral obligation to shutter Planned Parenthood, today’s Tea Party conservatives are even more zealous in their belief that government is the ultimate evil. After all, Ben Carson compared the Affordable Care Act to slavery. Ted Cruz, the shutdown’s most fevered supporter, believes that the fight over government “control” is “the epic battle of our generation.” Rand Paul put a chainsaw through the tax code. Over the summer, one in three Republicans polled said they believed Obama was running a federal military operation to invade Texas. In 2013, 44 percent of Republicans agreed that “an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties.” The rounding-error decrease to 43 percent this year does not make me feel safer.
Forget shrinking government to the size it can be drowned in a bathtub, the politicians clamoring for another shutdown want government done away with in the most gruesome manner possible—perhaps those Planned Parenthood videos are the inspiration for their actions in more ways than one.
Lately, Carly Fiorina has doubled down on her imaginary version of the Planned Parenthood videos and restated her support for the shutdown scheme…
…This coming shutdown is about the Republican Party’s position on Planned Parenthood, for sure. It’s also a statement about the Republican Party’s vision for how government should be used: punitively, or not at all. Their logic ties together almost the entire modern conservative platform, from gun rights to foreign policy: First, do harm.
