Cohen's Ode to Incoherence

Green with Tea Party envy

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By Richard Cohen, Monday, August 1, 6:59 PM

I suffer from Tea Party envy.

Aptly phrased—as though it were a psychological condition straight out of the DSM-IV.

There is little about the actual party I like and there are some members I abhor, but I am jealous of its sense of purpose, its determination and its bracing conviction that it is absolutely right.

Thank you. Now please end the column here before you begin embarrassing yourself.

In its own way, it waves a crimson battle flag while President Obama’s is a sickly taupe — the limp banner of an ideological muddle.

And here’s where it just gets silly. Obama is an ideologue. He always has been. The difference between Obama and the Tea Party is that ordinary Americans don’t recoil in horror when they hear about Tea Party values. Indeed the Tea Party wears its values on its sleeve; Obama guards his ideology more closely than his close friendships with domestic terrorists.

Obama would be a good White House chief of staff,

No. He wouldn’t. Even that position is vastly more managerial experience than he had prior to taking office. This is a man who has been told his entire life that he was incapable of failing. Now that the stakes are high, it’s why he is incapable of succeeding.

but as a president he lacks political savvy.

You want to know why the Tea Party has the passion that it does? It’s because we don’t blame our leaders’ failings on a lack of savvy.

He never knew how to get ahead of the Tea Party wave.

That would have been quite the feat, seeing as he was the one who created it.

He never knew how to marshal — or create — his own constituency. Republican invective notwithstanding, he lacks demagogic tools.

Hilariously, this comes in the same week that the Vice President of the Untied States and multiple members of both houses of Congress have called Republicans (and specifically Tea Party Republicans) terrorists, hostage-takers, and seditious. With all due respect, blow it out your ass, Richard.

Also, how would “Republican invective,” even if it’s all in Cohen’s addled mind, evince the absence of Obama’s demagogic tools? That sentence doesn’t make any sense.

He tries to solve problems instead of, for the Republicans, creating them.

Again, this sentence doesn’t make any sense. It’s as though he’s just sneezing out arbitrary prepositions. Despite being a the grammatical equivalent of Priscilla Presley’s misadventures in cosmetic surgery, I can still say with relative certainty that the sentiment that it’s groping to express is also flat-out wrong. Anyone with half a brain can see that the debt crisis was entirely created by Obama. Even Jim Cramer thinks so, indicating that absent half a brain, anyone with an extensive array of props and sound effects can also see to Obama’s colossal ineptitude.

Barack Obama does not do pain.

Please. Only Clubber Lang “does pain.”

Still, Obama came to the White House at a tough time for a Democrat.

A 78 seat majority in the House, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, a jubilant and self-congratulatory electorate, and an economy that had just about bottomed out under his predecessor? A president couldn’t possibly walk into a better situation.

Washington has gone topsy-turvy.

I know. President Obama’s stalwart cadre of media guardians are now trying to ply the revised history that Obama walked into a bad situation. The world certainly has changed in three years.

The liberal party, the Democrats, has turned conservative.

No. The electorate simply demanded that they stop the lunacy last year. And let’s not forget that they want to raise taxes in between recessions. (Yes, double-dip is coming.)

Its lawmakers want to conserve Social Security and conserve Medicare and conserve myriad other programs that have turned into patronage plums for important constituencies.

In other words, “why not bankrupt the country if it keeps getting me elected?”

The Republicans of the Tea Party, on the other hand, say they are conservatives, but they are really radicals — maybe even nihilists.

Why would Obama have to demagogue when you do it so cravenly for him?

They would rather destroy than compromise.

This is the liberal trap. By accusing conservatives of destruction, conservatives have one of two choices: 1) refute that a 10% decrease to a baseline that increases by 15% can, under no definition of the word, be described as destruction and thereby alienating the right with their timidity, or 2) admit that we do want to destroy wasteful and ineffective government programs, thereby alienating independents, who are generally the dumbest voters this side of a middle school class treasurer election.

They are drunk on bromides about Big Government and Small Business and the virtues of a balanced budget, no matter what damage all that does to an already sick economy.

Here is what Cohen simply can’t understand: we genuinely believe that large government corrupts and taints the economic liberty that serves as the lifeblood of the economy. We never believed that the government can grow the economy.

In another era, folks with this mentality would be yelling “Power to the people”

You pitiable little dullard. Advocating for limited government is advocating for the power of the people.

or some such thing, because a good slogan is more persuasive than careful analysis any day.

Because we aren’t mindless zealots, the Tea Party doesn’t actually have a slogan. “Taxed Enough Already” is a name origin that is still less often echoed than the homoerotic “teabagger” vulgarities of Jon Stewart and his self-loathing ilk. Indeed, conservatives never have good slogans, whereas everything liberals say is some derivative of “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”

You can, as they say, look that up.

That’s also not a slogan.

Obama is the president of political ennui. I say this out of empathy. He is like many of us, post-ideological.

Please. Don’t blame the President’s ineptitude on “political ennui.” If he was that bored with the process, he shouldn’t have spent two years begging America for the job. The reason that he did is that he isn’t bored. He does believe in a hard-left agenda. He’s not post-ideological and neither are you.

The rousing causes of yesteryear have faded — civil rights, voting rights, women’s rights and the antiwar fervor of the Vietnam era. Even gay rights has lost its urgency.

True. Conservatives moved beyond all of these issues in the 70s, when they were actually put to bed. Liberals have been throwing haymakers at ghosts for 30 years.

Gay people get elected to public office and can marry in certain states. The outcome of this fight is not in doubt.

Gay rights is the ultimate irony of liberal lunacy. Liberals want gays to be able to marry. Why? It’s not about equality. If that were the case, gay Americans and sympathizers to the cause would have started their own churches and married each other. Yet they haven’t—at least not in any significant number. Over the last fifty years, liberals have quilted a patchwork of government benefits to married couples made possible by the existence of the expanded role of government. Had government truly been limited, the only thing keeping gays from equal rights fifty years ago would have been their pastor. The political remedy for a recalcitrant clergy is simply changing churches. It would have taken about ten minutes and a Sunday morning whim. Instead, what was the political remedy for fixing the perceived inequity in big government? Thirty years of squandered political activism. The corruption of the Civil Rights movement.  Absurd curriculums for school children about androgynous kangaroos or Suzie trying to figure out how she came out of two vaginas simultaneously. And. most tragically, the permanent degradation of the gay community into the pet victims of the Democratic Party. Conservatives aren’t, for the most part, aghast at the idea of a man holding hands with another man. We resent the idea that our government is the one forcing to acknowledge this and that the unavoidable gravity of political correctness is pulling us to preface our objections with “it’s cool that you’re gay, but…”

Obama’s slogan was “Change.”

Technically, he had a bunch of slogans. “Yes we can.” “Change we can believe in.” “Please don’t ask Joe Biden any questions.”

It was supposed to suggest no more politics for the sake of politics. No more special-interest legislation. No more bridges to nowhere. But ever since the New Deal, the Democrats have been the party of programs.

Which is to say, Democrats are the party of special-interest legislation. Democrats are the party of bridges to nowhere and government-sponsored cowboy poetry, and federally-funded cocaine binges for monkeys.

They spend money,

Even when they don’t have to.

and now there is really no money to spend. For the Democrats, this is a considerable challenge. They are empty of political innovation.

This is actually a pretty stunning acknowledgement that liberals don’t know how to govern without massive deficit spending. Beyond that, it also acknowledges that every area where government could reasonably expand to has already been expanded to.

The Tea Party is not. It knows precisely what it wants to do. It stands in shimmering contrast to Obama, who seems vaguely at a loss.

These are the refreshing moments where he gropes for clarity. It’s like watching a baby take its first steps.

He had ideas galore, but they were merely interesting and not powered by ideological passion. He liked. He didn’t love.

And then watching that same baby fall on it’s ass, and wondering, as a parent, if your child’s inability to walk at 5 is somehow your fault.

Afghanistan is the epitome of Obamaism: More troops and then fewer troops and the goal is not to win, just merely to end it so that it does not look like a loss.

Yet more evidence that liberals can not be trusted to protect this country.

It’s a vaporous policy, a war in the spirit of the one waged in Libya, which could have ended by now had the United States not stopped its active participation.

Or not gotten involved at all.

Does he want to win? Does he care about losing? What’s the cause? Obama’s wars lack music.

After listening to the Post’s editorial writers shower praise on Obama for nuance in foreign policy and dismiss comparisons of Libya to Syria as incongruent, it seems now that conservatives were precisely correct in their assessment of Obama’s geopolitical idiocy (and the idiocy of the guilt-ridden lunatics like Samantha Powers that advise him.)

Also, on a more personal note, I was absolutely correct in calling for more political assassinations.

The odd thing about the Tea Party is that it uses Washington to attack Washington. This is a version of Hannah Arendt’s observation that totalitarian movements use democratic institutions to destroy democracy.

Excuse me for a moment; my head just exploded.

How the hell can an ideology of smaller government be totalitarian? That’s like saying that vegans are pro-slaughterhouse or that peace protestors are a cog in the military industrial complex.

(This is what Islamic radicals will do in Egypt.)

Have done. As memory serves, conservatives predicted that as well. But then again, we’re talking about Egyptian jihadists and theocrats, not Egyptian libertarians—which don’t exist.

Note that the Tea Party is nowhere near a majority — not in the House and not in the Senate. Its followers have only 60 seats in the 435-member House,

Do you think he knows that the Tea Party isn’t actually a political party? It’s a House sub-caucus of the Republicans, many of whom are sympathetic non-members.

but in a textbook application of political power they were able to use parliamentary rules to drive the congressional agenda.

As opposed to what? Guns? This isn’t Syria. What exactly were you expecting?

As we have known since Lenin’s day, a determined minority is hands down better than an irresolute majority.

Lenin was a Bolshevik you fucktard. Bolshevik, in Russian, literally means majority party. After they purged the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks stopped being the majority party and started becoming the only party.

The Tea Party has recklessly diminished the power and reach of the United States. It has shrunk the government and will, if it can, further deprive it of revenue.

There’s nothing reckless about it. We want to diminish the power of the federal government domestically. That is a winning electoral argument. You know how I know? Because it won in 2010.

The domestic economy will suffer

For the guy who seems to have not learned anything from Soviet Russia, I’ll take my chances with economic freedom.

and the gap between rich and poor, the educated and the indolently schooled, will continue to widen.

Indolent? How does excessive spending fix laziness?

International relations will lack a dominant power able to enforce the rule of law, and the bad guys will be freer to be as bad as they want.

This is a bad joke, right? This is basically a tacit admission that neoconservative foreign policy was right all along. Someone owes an apology to Donald Rumsfeld (among others).

Maybe the deficit will be brought under control, but nothing else will.

By the criteria Cohen sets out (profligate federal spending and a hyperaggressive foreign policy), George W. Bush was the best president since Lyndon Johnson.

I worry — and I envy (but will not forgive) those who don’t.

Somebody get this neurotic fruitcake a yoga mat. I’m worried he’s going to have an embolism right here.