The Republican Party: The Heaven's Gate of Politics

     If you've lost Chris Wallace of Fox "News" and more than a few of your party members over ObamaCare, then perhaps it's time to start throwing going away parties for your lobbyist buddies and sending out your resume to K Street.
     This is an interview that Chris Wallace conducted on Friday with Sen. Rafael "Ted" Cruz, a guy who'd renounced his Canadian citizenship and will any day now change his name to Theodore Cross because it sounds more WASPish. Well, Senator Lady Eyes seems to think he can collect enough votes in the Senate and is calling Harry Reid's perfectly legal parliamentary tactics heavy-handed thuggery (such as caving in to the Republicans last year and not changing the rules regarding the filibuster, for instance). Cruz is probably right when he says he can get that magical 41st vote that'll deny cloture and open the door for a filibuster but he doesn't stop there: He actually thinks:

a) Eventually, he'll get enough Republicans on board in a Democrat-controlled body to either shut down the government or defund ObamaCare.

b) That Senate Republicans will succeed in passing such a bill and then a reconciled bill with the House and

c) That even if the US Congress goes batshit insane and presents such a reconciled bill to the president's desk that Mr. Obama will not veto such a bill and willingly defund his signature piece of domestic legislation.

d) Oh, and the vast majority of the American people loathe ObamaCare as much as the GOP pretends to.

      Fact check:  The vast majority of the American people love the Affordable Care Act, warts and all, and if we hated it as much as Senator Lady Eyes has convinced himself, the Other Guy would've won last November.
      Fact check: Ted has it backwards: The GOP is not as willing to make the government default on its debt obligations and have our bond rating downgraded for, like, the first time ever but he is. In this Fox interview, Ted was playing the part of the reluctant hostage taker and saying, "I don't want to shoot this hostage in the head but if I have to, it'll hurt me more than this poor, innocent victim."
      Ted Cruz is an out of control psychopath who was inexplicably elected to the upper chamber last year and has gotten way too much air time for a freshman senator. Ted Cruz and several of his fellow deadenders are the ones who do want to shut down the government and repeal or defund ObamaCare with this poison pill they'd inserted into it. This party had no problem shutting down the government in 1995-6, they had no problem with sequester and they will have no problem with harming this nation more by shutting down many vital government services.
     But the presumed Stockholm Syndrome is a fantasy Republicans seem to have. Not too many of us, even Teabaggers who have to depend upon government programs and services just to sustain life, are going to be too happy when everything comes to a grinding halt and they will remember these scorched earth tactics come election day '14.
     Which is the one thing President Obama never has to worry about ever again for the rest of his life: Re-election. Which is why, even if by some dark miracle a reconciled version of the House bill defunding ObamaCare gets to his desk, he will have no problem vetoing or even pocket-vetoing it. And if it ever got to that point, the president can just say to the GOP with his huge megaphone, "YOU built this government shut down, not me."
     But the GOP doesn't see it that way because there are just enough of these apocalyptic assclowns like Ted Cruz to make the GOP look as bad as al Qaida makes Muslims in general look: Like a massive cabal of inflexible, fundamentalist hind leg chewers. The GOP is the Heaven's Gate of politics, one that seems as hell-bent on its own destruction as it is on ours. Despite their laughable minority outreach program, they still make it plain how much they loathe people darker than Edgar Winter. Despite marriage equality now in 15 states, they still insist on hating teh gays. Despite women comprising over half the electorate, they still insist, especially in Ted's home state of Texas, of waging war on women's rights.
     And then they'll wonder, as they did last November, why they got their fat, pasty asses kicked in 2014.