About Those Republican Priorities

I touched on the Republicans' lack of interest in governing in the post below, and then ran across this article by Brian Beutler at TPM:

Like all recent GOP budgets, this year’s proposes lots of spending on defense and security, at the expense of all other programs. Specifically, it sets the total pool of discretionary dollars at sequestration levels, then funnels money from thinly stretched domestic departments (like Transportation and HUD) to the Pentagon and a few other agencies. But that’s all the budget says. It doesn’t say how to allocate the dollars, nor does it grapple in any way with the possibility that cutting domestic spending so profoundly might be unworkable. It’s an abstraction.

Indeed, Paul Ryan’s entire reputation rests upon these kinds of abstractions. His budgets imagine huge cuts to Medicaid and food stamps and Medicare and so on, but they have no binding force. His allure to the conservative movement as a vice presidential nominee was that he’d be uniquely suited to turn these abstractions into reality.

But many close Congress watchers — and indeed many Congressional Democrats — have long suspected that their votes for Ryan’s budgets were a form of cheap talk. That Republicans would chicken out if it ever came time to fill in the blanks. Particularly the calls for deep but unspecified domestic discretionary spending cuts.

Today’s Transportation/HUD failure confirms that suspicion.

What it boils down to is that we're really dealing with kabuki in Washington. The teabaggers don't know what they're doing, they have no ability to actually govern the country, even if they wanted to, and they're not smart enough to back off -- or they've boxed themselves into an ideological position that won't allow it. So what we're left with is a Congressional majority made up of infantile poseurs.

Or, more bluntly, they're a bunch of freakin' two year olds.