Tea Party Ted Off The Cliff: Shutdown Showdown Hoedown.

Sideshow, stage show, or anti-government-fanatic’s peepshow – whatever you call the Ted Cruz Tea Party Express to Political Obscurity, the extreme right wing’s absolutism is all it will take to end the Republican Tea Party minority rule of Congress. In the end, the Tea Party won’t destroy Obamacare – it will only destroy itself.

The question for those of us who are not overly-lobbied politicians is: Why are we allowing our government to behave like sugar-high 5-year olds wielding machetes? When the phone rings and the pollster asks who you blame for the government shutdown – we should say we blame ourselves – because as society we’re the ones who drank the cable news channels’ Kool-Aid and voted those children into Congress. Californians are just as much to blame as Texas for voting Ted Cruz into the Senate, because all of us have allowed the education and information bubbles to be hyper-isolated… but that rant is for another article.

Tea Party hates government and loves chaos, but the party will end.

Will the far right flank continue to make implementation of the ACA difficult? Of course they will. That’s how they started in the first place. It’s Tea Party pay-per-view ($59.99) to chair-smash Obamacare, the President, and any word they can find that starts with “Dem” – but that doesn’t mean they’ll stop Obamacare. They’ll muck up the process and dirty the definitions. Fox News will insert the phrase “train wreck” as many times as they can, then TP politicians will go home to the poorest states in the country who actually need the ACA claiming victory – remaining totally unaware that being the most stubborn and ignorant person in the room does not make you the strongest… it just makes you stubborn and ignorant.

Republicans in the extreme right wing will huff and puff and bloviate the House down, but the adults in the room must never forget that a person ranting, kicking, and screaming doesn’t mean succeeding. The loudest person in the room isn’t winning the debate… they’re just annoying. They’re bass frequencies of a bad trance track heard through the floor of your first apartment in Queens. The annoying party always ends, and After The Storm of jeers and cheers and cheap beer, everyone goes home.

The Short Bus Board of Directors of Republicanland will continue to throw wrenches into the Affordable Care Act machine and make the process more difficult, and they will continue raise money from people who prefer a simplified life as a result. From outside the dome of Republicanland, the Tea Party’s cyclical similarity with the Prohibitionists continues to prove true. The Tea Party’s dangerous refusal to compromise… that characteristic that they believe makes them strong – is what will ultimately be the downfall of the Tea Party in America because it makes their movement so weak.

The Tea Party can throw out the phrase “ObamaCare is a train wreck” as many times as they want (clearly some GOP consultant decided that would be the phrase of choice, since it has spewed from the mouths of 100% of republican politicians as well as all super-red media outlets. Honestly, one Congressman literally just blurted out “train wreck!” at the end of an interview today without any context whatsoever!). In the end, however, the Tea Party can’t kill ObamaCare. In the end-end, only progressives will end ObamaCare by turning it into a proper single-payer health system (you know, like MediCare), which is what it should be since it has proven to be the only sustainable system due to the leverage it has with providers.

A Nod To Harry Reid For Giving Tea Party Ted Enough Rope

For the first time in a long while, I feel like I should give a head nod to Senator Harry Reid. He has earned back some respect from his allowing Ted Cruz to perform his fake filibuster. I generally have one rule that never changes in politics: if your opponent is crazy, create situations that encourage them to show it to the electorate. That’s what Harry Reid did; in a way that he knew was safe for the Democratic cause. “Go ahead, Senator Cruz, you talk about Nazi’s and health care while the rest of us are Movin’ On with reality, and concepts like empathy and not punching holes in the bottom of our own boat.”

Ted Cruz’s bedtime story to the Tea Party allowed a large part of the country that doesn’t’ pay attention to politics to see a bag of hot air personified on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Ted Cruz took the rope and jumped off the cliff for all to see, not realizing that Reid hadn’t tied the other end to anything. Senator Cruz will raise a lot of money as a result of his swan song dive, but he also positioned himself in a place that guarantees he will never be a viable national figure. He is a Texas pigeon who will cluck to his based, but never escape the fence.

The Tea Party Doesn’t Understand How Government Works

This is not an overstatement. There are a handful of republicans who identify themselves with the Tea Party who understand the various roles of government, but the true Tea Party crowd that’s holding America hostage – those who go on television and call a government shutdown “a paid vacation” – they literally don’t know how government works. Some don’t understand how laws are passed, and others believe that government ought provide no services whatsoever… then they drive home on a freeway, pay for a drink with cash, wave to the police and fire stations, send their kids to public schools, and look forward to the day when they get that to which they are entitled: Social Security and MediCare.

The Tea Party is built on an ideology that doesn’t fit within the operations of government, let along civilized society. They are oil on water: it’s shiny, and it burns, but it cannot combine and it eventually washes out to sea. If a group of people who are trying to fix government don’t even understand it, they won’t succeed at anything more than making fools of themselves. These people want the government to fail because they are nearly blind to all the services and privileges that it has given them, their families; their ancestors, and future generations. They are the most selfish, self-righteous people ever to coagulate in Washington, DC., willing get paid by the Koch brothers and leave the rest of the country High and Dry.

Tea Party Ted Took The Rope, the Rest Will Following Him Off The Cliff

One thing the Republican Party has always been good at is staying on message. “How are you doing today?” one might ask, the a republican congressman will reply, “Reagan. Cut taxes, Obama is the devil. Train wreck! Reagan. Jobs. Freedom!” There is a problem with have such a train in their political DNA, however: they’ll stay on message even if it means following Ted Cruz off the political cliff. Am I saying the professional Tea Partiers are incapable of thinking for themselves? Ask Rush Revere and then decide for yourself. Based on my personal experience thus far, the post-2008 republican-wired brain’s reaction to their leader of the hour is,  “I Will Follow You Into The Dark“. Whenever I spend more than 20 minutes in a conversation with a die hard Tea Party group, I always end up feeling like I have Vertigo due to the suffocating, recycled air of the talking points.

When you combine their purification desires, their “stick to the message” mentality, and uncomfortably low level of understanding of facts and how a government works, the Tea Party Posse doesn’t have very much going for it. Absolutism never succeeds. Ever. They’ve gone over the fiscal cliff, now they’ll follow Tea Party Ted off the political cliff – waving their American flags so vigorously that they don’t even realize the edge has been passed as they fall.

It’s how it has been. It’s how it will be. Human, lemming, and rabid political party base behavior never changes.