A summation of Alice in tea partyland..............
Opinion: The GOP's 'alternate universe' - Matt Stoller - POLITICO.com
The financial crisis and now the debt ceiling have revealed deep stress fractures in our politics. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is running for president on the premise that not paying government debts won’t mean default. She’s doing pretty well. It seems that loudly denouncing the idea that 1+1 = 2 is an appealing message in Republican politics.
Though the majority of the really toxic subprime loans were made by banks and mortgage companies, and one big private firm, American International Group, sold the biggest bundle of credit default swaps, the financial industry was not a cause of the crisis, Republicans say. Nope, it was all Fannie and Freddie.
f you listened only to conservatives, you would think that the health care law was some sort of fascist takeover — though the leading GOP presidential candidate implemented a nearly identical system in Massachusetts. Many features of the plan were hatched by the conservative Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s, and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) put forward a plan approved by the House Republicans to turn Medicare into a system similar to Obamacare.
Somehow, for Republicans, the private sector can do no wrong. When it does wrong, it’s not the private sector that did it.
Back in 2004, a Bush administration official laid out what is now clearly the Republican Party’s guiding philosophy. The official spoke to a journalist as though he were from a foreign land — since he hailed from “what we call the reality-based community.”
“When we act,” the official said, “we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
It’s unclear whether the Republicans want to, or even can, leave this alternate universe that they have constructed. Unfortunately, it’s also unclear whether our society can survive it.