Last night I was having dinner with my friend Dave. We started exploring the question of whether the House Republicans were crazier when Clinton was Prez or now. Remember how totally outrageous the House was under the Newtster? They shut down the government…twice. And then they decided to impeach the President, essentially, for getting a blow job. The two charges that passed along party lines in the House was easily dismissed by the Senate.
There was a kind of zealotry in that bunch of Republicans that parallels what we see today. They share a collective tone-deafness that has caused House Republicans—then and now—to unwittingly undertake extreme actions that Americans disagree with.
Both then and now, there was a zealotry that was borne out of hatred for the Democratic President. But here is a difference I see between then and now. Republicans seemed angrier, but less crazy in their zealotry back then. Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde were angry and cynical men, who sometimes said outrageous things to make a point—but a point that had some connection to reality. The current crop of Republicans are expressing zealotry borne out of a much bigger dose of madness. It seems many in the current crop have been brainwashed into believing things that are at odds with facts, with reality (Kenya!, Obama Muslim conspiracy!, cutting taxes raises revenue, Obamacare kills!, etc.).
Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert seem to really believe the crazy-ass shit they say. They live in a largely self-constructed universe.
In some cases it seems the hatred observed of both groups is confounded in the current crop by racial hatred. It has driven some House Republicans to insanity.
So what do you think? Were they crazier in the crazy House days of the Clinton Administration? Has Obama derangement syndrome pushed today’s G.O.P. further off the cliff of sanity? Or was the Newt-pack just as bad?
I think it’s crazier now. We didn’t have Republicans threatening to take down the economy when Clinton was president. They wanted to take HIM down, but they didn’t want to destroy anything that got in the way of that.
I don’t know if they’re crazier, but they’re certainly shriller. The home schooling fad has given rise to a new breed of ignoramuses.
Clinton was impeached for lying under oath. A felony when serfs like us do it.
And the government was shut down by Tip O’Neill 6 times under Reagan, and 6 times by the GOP under Clinton. And Barack Obama voted against raising the debt ceiling when Bush was president.
It’s all theater of the absurd and it only encourages them when we pay attention.
They are no shriller now than before. Look at the BS hurled back and forth in the years after the founding, or leading up to the Civil War. This is child’s play.
This seems appropriate on this thread.
Sarah wasn’t the only flakey nutjob introduced by McCain. “We need a white Republican President!”
Crazier now. Back then it was more of a threat that they might unleash the crazies on the right if the more mainstream didn’t get what they wanted. Now the crazies run the place.
@4
Wow. Joe Wurzelbacher’s desperate search for relevancy continues.
And rolling out the re-tread, ‘no you’re not a racist if you pine away fro old while guys to have all the power.’ – he could have been a bit more original.
Should we call him Joe the Attention Whore?
The nugget of evil in an otherwise merely banal retelling of right-wing talking points du jour.
You’re advocating abandoning engagement with government – an insidious prerequisite for the ‘government it evil’ or ‘drown it in a bathtub’ crowd….a rejection of the notion that government is (or rather, should be) a projection of popular will, that government is a means for solving big problems and creating value and prosperity that cannot be accomplished by individuals, that government is a force for good and for the protection of the individual or groups of individuals against the predations of the more rapacious of our fellow citizens – usually entitled elites (usually Republicans).
The same people braying ‘government is evil’ or demanding ‘small government’ are invariably those desperately trying to gain control of government, to gain government office, and ultimately to bend it to the will of a small, monied elite.
A truly representative government, elected by an educated, fully franchised populace and funded by a robust progressive tax system, is THE MOST TERRIFYING boogeyman that the Kochs and the Waltons and the Romneys and all the rest can imagine. We see their terror every day in the actions of the modern Republican party, particularly the Teahaddist monster that has escaped their control.
This is interesting. A guy calling himself “Joshua R. Poulson” has posted here somewhat sporadically over the past few years, and not one of those posts shows any impediment in terms of comprehending basic facts. Yet, today, a guy calling himself “Joshua Poulson,” and using the same avatar as “Joshua R. Poulson” pipes up @3 above spewing standard, right-wing, factually challenged talking points. Joshua R. appears to be of a Libertarian bent. Plain old Joshua appears to be just plain stupid:
Clinton was impeached for lying under oath. A felony when serfs like us do it.
No, lying under oath is not a felony. Perjury is a felony. Simply lying under oath does not constitute perjury. People who don’t understand the difference between “lying under oath” and “perjury” ought to refrain from discussing the subject.
And the government was shut down by Tip O’Neill 6 times under Reagan, and 6 times by the GOP under Clinton.
Actually, while Tip O’Neill was Speaker of the House, there were a total of 12 instances where the government spent a period of time without an effective appropriations bill. Five of those instances occurred before the so-called “Civiletti Memos” which required government agencies to cease operations until a new appropriations bill was passed. None of those 12 instances lasted more than three days, mostly because they extended over a weekend, and none of them involved any form of deep, ideological divide between the two major parties.
There’s a reason people don’t remember any of these as constituting a “shutdown” of the government–it’s because none of them actually shut the government down in any significant way.
And Barack Obama voted against raising the debt ceiling when Bush was president.
Yes. A lone, symbolic vote that, at the time, everyone knew wasn’t going to result in any failure to raise the debt ceiling. Clearly that’s exactly the same as an entire sub-caucus seriously threatening to not raise the debt ceiling. Anyone who deigns to mention then Sen. Obama’s vote in this context is either a complete buffoon or is deliberately trying to obscure the truth.
Which brings me to the only remotely accurate thing in the comment @3:
Look at the BS hurled back and forth in the years after the founding, or leading up to the Civil War.
Yes. In order to find a time when Congress was as deeply divided as it is now, we have to reach back to the years leading up to the Civil War. AND WE ENDED UP GOING TO WAR! How dense does someone have to be in order for the significance of that fact to be so casually dismissed as Joshua (without the R) dismisses it?
There are more displaced people in the economy now than when Clinton was President. When Clinton was elected people didn’t have personal computers and mobile phones and the Internet was not as advanced as today. Remember that the Lewinsky hearings broadcast from the NY Times website were one of the first experiments with national live streaming video over the Internet. That meant there were plenty of jobs and anyone who was willing to learn anything about computers could get a job. Now that these technologies have been built, the jobs are gone, some of them outsourced. In the absence of the ability to participate in the economy, and with 1 in 100 people going to jail, there are a lot of crazies out there. 1 in every 6 women has experienced domestic violence. That means there are a lot of male abusers out there and this is the tea party constituency. If they weren’t blocked from employment because of the economy and because of discrimination against people with criminal records, they might not be so angry at the government. They hate the government because it put them in jail for abuse or a minor drug charge.
The right wing was crazier in the 1950s and 1960s with the opposition to desegregation and with the House Un-American Activities Committee attacking decent people.
We’re talking 1992.
Wrong on personal computers.. They were quite popular and prevalent. Just about every forward looking office environment had some of them.. Maybe not one on EVERY desk but they were a strong presence. The USSR in the eighties (pre-Gorbachev) was paranoid of falling behind behind because American kids had access to personal computers.
Half-right on mobile phones.. I remember dating my wife in the late eighties and the huge things were perched on people’s tables at trendy restaraunts. Expensive and bulky but available. By the time Clinton left office, I believe the phones had shrunk to Motorola Star-Tac size. All the guys were showing them off, wearing them on their hips.
Absolutely right on the internet at least in November 1992 when Clinton was elected. The only people who had access were academics, university staff, government/defense contractors and the like. Some ISP’s like UUNET did exist but were expensive and TCP/IP stacks for PC’s were primitive. If people wanted to go “on-line” in those days they dialed up BBS’s, compuserve or prodigy.. AOL may have been in ramp up mode at the time.
Small independent ISP’s took off big time in 93/94? It was the rage to dial up to a cheap ISP to web surf with Mosaic and then Netscape Navigator. By 95/96 the independent ISP’s seemed old hat and started failing and getting bought out by the bigger fish. By 98 I had my first ATT@Home cable modem. I’m still using that same cable hookup today to write this.
How time flies.
@6 Like a Kardashian, only sleazier.
@9 During the last half of the 1990’s, while half of Congress was obsessing about a stained blue dress and Wall Street redefined the term “high technology” to mean “selling shit online”, it’s indeed true that a lot of people, some of them fresh out of high school, found gainful employment figuring out Web technology on the fly, and some of ’em were fortunate enough to work for startups that went public and yielded handsome payouts.
At the same time, a great many more worked their butts off for outfits that didn’t make it, and by the turn of the millenium had ended up drinking, smoking, snorting or fucking away most of what they did get paid. Meanwhile, Blue Collar America was being systematically dismantled, and hundreds of thousands of mainly union workers who’d comprised the bulk of the middle class, from factory workers and plumbers to primary care physicians, found themselves sucked from being financially comfortable to working twice as hard for a fraction of the pay…if they were the lucky ones. All this was engineered by the same people responsible for Ted Cruz and Michelle Bachmann polluting our consciousness with their drivel, unfortunately with the all-too-willing acquiescence of a Democratic Party whose platitudes about social progressiveness act as varnish over a mindset that’s fiscally quite conservative and pro-business.
By the way…last week was the 40th anniversary of the organization that was to become A.L.E.C.