New York Times Puts Republicans on the Couch

In a shutdown post-mortem so subtly bizarre that one must chew a lemon to avoid vertigo, the New York Times explores the cruelty and coldness of the morning after — therapy style.

It’s important to apprehend how the Times sets up the piece to appreciate the absolute strangeness of what follows. Here’s the key preamble:

On talk radio and in the conservative blogosphere, the bipartisan vote on Wednesday to reopen the government without defunding President Obama’s health care law was being excoriated as an abject surrender and betrayal by spineless establishment Republicans. But for glum and frustrated conservative voters on Thursday around breakfast tables in eastern Tennessee, in the shadow of a military base in Colorado Springs and on the streets of suburban Philadelphia, it was as much a surrender to reality as to Democratic demands. (emphasis added)

That’s fine. But what’s the ‘reality’ the Times perceives? Let’s dive in.

Meet Bob McIntire, an insurance executive in Cleveland, TN. Here is Bob’s reality:

To Mr. McIntire, that reality was a media environment in which conservatives don’t get a fair hearing, a unified and shrewd Democratic opposition, and a Congress hopelessly compromised by Washington deal making.

Right off the bat, it’s clear that ‘reality’ has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Every one of Mr. McIntire’s perceptions is dead wrong — including that of a ‘shrewd’ Democratic bloc. (Would that it were true. ‘Resolved’ is not the same as ‘shrewd’.)

Then there’s Andre Zarb-Cousin of Colorado Springs, CO:

“The shutdown had to end,” said Andre Zarb-Cousin of Colorado Springs, who said that he believes the Affordable Care Act could destroy the country. “Who’s suffering? Veterans’ families. People being on welfare.”

Andre’s reality includes the fiction that the ACA will bring the United States to its knees — something the Axis powers couldn’t achieve, nor the psychotic machinations of Al-Qaeda. But Andre has company, in one Rush Limbaugh:

“I was thinking about this last night, too, while I was pondering if I can ever remember a greater political disaster in my lifetime,” Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday on his radio show, “if I could ever remember a time when a political party just made a decision not to exist for all intents and purposes.”

Now we’re in a parallel universe of ‘reality’, but that’s where the Times wants us, apparently. Certainly Watergate, the death of both Kennedys, the Bay of Pigs, Iran-Contra, the Iraq War, or the spurious impeachment of a sitting President — all of which have happened in Rush’s lifetime — must pale in comparison to the cataclysm of a conceded two-week debt ceiling scuffle. And no, the conservative wing of the Republican Party was doing just wonderfully after Goldwater’s drubbing in 1964. And Democrats celebrated the tub-thumping meted out to Walter Mondale in the presidential contest of 1984.

There’s much more, but let’s allow Karen Brask, a driving instructor in Pennsylvania, to assure us that the right wing has a vice-like grasp on ‘reality’, and that the New York Times knows how to recognize it:

And in Pennsylvania, Karen Brask, 57, a driving instructor, said she had no problems with the Republicans’ hard line that led the nation dangerously close to default. “I don’t mind at all that they are in there kicking and fighting for limited government and the whole personal responsibility thing,” she said. “This is American politics at its finest.”

Indeed.

By: rhb

Rob is a NYC-based Internet entrepreneur. He's also a businessman and job creator (wait: doesn't demand create jobs?) who understands the sense, and the eventual predominance, of the progressive agenda.