Ceiling

Sigh.

As Driftglass reminds us at the link above, these assholes have been doing this little "locked out of the toilet but I'm busting to piss - on YOU!" debt ceiling dance for thirty years or more.

It's always the same; starve the grannies or we shoot the hostage.

The "reporting" is always the same, too; "conscienceless terrorist holds global economy hostage, but claims to be noble patriot; opinions differ!".

It's always pointless to remind everyone that the GQP is full of shit - if they want to "balance the budget" it's perfectly legit - MORE than legit - to do it on the wallets of billionaires and defense contractors than on granny's grocery budget.

But even if that fact was clearly presented the whole nonsensical farrago is never even remotely close to the truth...because these assholes could give a shit about the budget. 

Proof? The only Trump "accomplishment" - the ridiculously named "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" - blew a massive, WW2-size hole in the federal budget. And, since it gave tax cuts to fatcats, the Republicans were juuuuust fine with that.

The bottom line with these nimrods is that they want to go back to the pre-New Deal nation of their wet dreams, where the poor were really poor and desperate and the fear of starvation kept the smelly proles silent and afraid.

And I remind you that it WAS a dream - for them - and a nightmare for everyone else. It was never a real thing. It's the usual Republican lie about the "good old days".

The "good old days" were pretty shitty for probably about 60% of the people in this country.

Financial "panics" impoverishing working people. Predatory cartels and trusts. Lethal jobs paying shit. Hopeless poverty once you were too old or too broken to work even those awful jobs.

The pre-Deal U.S. was as often as not a contentious snakepit of class and racial hatred, the only time in U.S. history that an actual socialist party got more than a derisively tiny handful of votes...because so many Americans were furiously angry at (imagine!) the fear of starvation and destitution. The examples of Soviet communism and European fascism were looming threats to the American Experiment.

That wily old plutocrat FDR didn't come up with Social Security because he was a hairy-handed Man of the People.

It was because he was a wily plutocrat and knew that if you imiserated the proles hard enough pretty soon they would decide that it was worth their while to try and put you in the barber chair for a close trim from the national razor.

The modern GQP is a lot of things. But "wily" is not even remotely among them.

So we're going to go through this idiotic piss-dance again.

Driftglass has another bit of wisdom about that:

You can be a good American.

(in the sense of believing in the genuine promise of the United States - equal justice under law)

Or a good Republican.

But not both.