So Democrats are all cranky about Republicans trying to starve the federal budget in order to stop Obamacare before it gets entrenched in American society. They’re talking like Republicans are hostage takers who shouldn’t be appeased, for fear of what they’ll demand next time.
I suppose, also, that the Republicans were asking for it. When the bill was being discussed, the Democrats would say things like “you’ll have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it,” and would get responses like “I hope they’ll change the things I disagree with, but I’m voting for it anyway.”
It’s more than a little silly, since we’ve had budgetary crises resolved after the government shut down on more than one occasion in recent history with no collapse of civilization or explosion of galaxies, but I am concerned about the elevation of the threat language (see also the recent abrupt introduction of “war on women” talk regarding the Vatican’s longstanding and unchanging teachings on abortion and contraception), about how the landscape has apparently changed from conservatives and liberals being neighbors who could negotiate with each other over differences of opinion on how to achieve goals held in common, to viewing each other as alien powers incapable of dialog who each could only hope to modify the other's behavior.
That’s what alarms me. Talk isn’t just transparently manipulative and senile to the hypocrisy of the speaker, it’s hostile: we talk about Islamist terrorist groups this way. What’s next?
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