<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" There was an act of absurdity in the U.S. Senate yesterday -- and it was not called &amp;quot;convening for the day,&amp;quot; ya bastids. There were 27 Republican senators who voted &amp;quot;symbolically&amp;quot; to repudiate their own actual votes a couple of weeks ago to raise the debt ceiling. This is every single Republican who voted to raise the debt ceiling. It is important to know this because the ranks of the repudiators include notable &amp;quot;moderates&amp;quot; like Kelly Ayotte and our reasonable friend from South Carolina, Huckleberry J. Butchmeup. This is important to know because of the simple fact that, for pure, sweaty, bowel-whitening fear, there is no such thing as a Republican &amp;quot;moderate&amp;quot; any more. They are all terrified, at one level or another, of empowered and weaponized insanity. You may recall that John Kerry once was lampooned from hell to breakfast for having voted for something before he was against it. Haw, haw. These clowns, because they live in terror of billionaires who write checks, and angry shut-ins who buy gold from Glenn Beck, and costumed clowns in tricornered hats, just did something far beyond anything Kerry ever did. They voted to apologize to those very forces for having been responsible enough to keep the United States from defaulting on its fiscal obligations. This may well have been the silliest vote ever taken in the history of the United States Senate, and that is saying something, indeed. Consider what it means. For 12 days, the government shut down, and the country flirted with default, because a rump faction of the House of Representatives in the worst Congress ever elected, led by a renegade senator from Texas who belongs in a zoo, scared the entire Republican party into a dangerous inertia. Finally, with even the Chamber of Commerce howling in anger, the Senate voted a stop-gap measure aimed at keeping the absolute worst from happening. It managed to pass the House, primarily through Democratic votes. The worst was averted. Temporarily. Now, while we&amp;#039;re all hanging fire to see what happens after the first of the year, the people who did the right thing, and helped the country avoid the fiscal abyss, find themselves obligated, essentially, to apologize to the people who did the most damage, and to the people who supported them, because, otherwise, there might be a political price to be paid for not wrecking the economy. This is not leadership. This is submitting to an ideological show trial because you want to keep your job at the expense of actually doing your job. It is always important to look at the people whom politicians fear the most. Fear is a great motivator. It is certainly a more than adequate mirror. It is a good way to judge the character of individual politicians and the collective responsibility of a political party or a congressional caucus. Identify what they&amp;#039;re afraid of. Identify the people they believe can do them the most damage. Do that, and you discover a great deal about their commitment to the public good. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, major national Republican politicians, almost unanimously, man and woman, old and young, are terrified of madness. They seek to appease it. They seek to delay its inevitable vengeance. They seek to reason, symbolically, with unreason. They are willing to sacrifice the common good for that. They are willing to look ridiculous in public rather than risk the abandoned wrath of people beyond the ability of anyone to conciliate. They jump at shadows. They freeze, motionless, at every rustling in the bushes. And they have constructed among them a party for which these terrors are very real. This is a party for which Bob Bennett in Utah was not conservative enough. This is a party that is halfway to bungling yet another golden chance to take over the United States Senate because there are within it centers of power too busy at the moment finding primary challengers to obscure right-wing nebbishes like Thad Cochran in Mississippi. It is not always the wind that rustles the bushes. Every shadow is not always a tree branch or a cloud in front of the moon. Some of the dangers are substantial ones. But, still, there has to be a limit to the extent to which these people will grovel to their own fears, real and otherwise. There has to be a moment of, simply, enough. At some point, you have to get tired of constructing alibis for having done the right thing. At some point, you have to decide that the people yelling on the radio don&amp;#039;t matter as much as the country does. At some point, you have to stop apologizing to people who never will accept that apology. At some point. We are not there yet, and they are bringing the country down, and that is not symbolic. That is what is actually happening. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25479/absurdity-in-the-senate-103013/>