p m carpenter’s commentary: Virtual treason:
I’m tempted to also recommend an escalated Phase IV in the immediate afterwash of a presidential Phase III’s vilification campaign against Republican despicability and ludicrousness: a nearly unprecedented but rhetorically justifiable, Perry-like Phase IV of “treasonous.” What else should one call what congressional Republicans have wrought? Their obstructionism has exemplified a prodigious betrayal of trust; for 10 months the House has dithered on cultural warring rather than even a singular jobs bill, while the Senate minority-as-effective-majority has blocked bill after helpful bill for reasons purely political — and deliberately destructive to the nation’s welfare.
It’s not treason to believe that some of us (and in the broad sense “we”) must suffer in the short term for the sake of longer term fiscal, political, even moral health.
American conservatism operates according to a coherent ideology, which is not the same as to say that it’s fully thought out, or that very many conservatives are capable of explaining it, or that it makes sense and will work, but conservatives are not shy about making its implications, as they see them – the general shape of their free market capitalist utopia – obvious. If what they do, or refuse to do, in order to advance this vision is treason, then every act of government, or every omission, every favoring in policy of one sector over another, or of the future over the present, would be treason: Government itself would be treason of some kind (this paradox actually does have a function within the philosophical system that underlies our possibly exhausted theories of constitutional governance).
The contemporary left, by contrast, embraces the great muddle, and, bereft of theory, falls back on notions of the grand collective interest… as expressed in plans to put a few hundred thousand government employees to work next year. We might favor the proposal, but no one’s going to risk death on the barricades for it. In the meantime, the assertion that we are one seems to be contradicted by the first mildly combative gesture.
Driftglass isn’t actually naive to think that because you call it a jobs bill, it is one, We live in the world of Obama’s increasingly
byzantine health care labyrinth, and the Sutton/Dillinger bill, that doesn’t address the prime movers of the crisis, I do find the House’s efforts milquetoast with butter, frankly, as they have only lightly forayed into challenging both of these structures,