One of my favorite science fiction writers and one of my favorite pundits is John Scalzi. He nailed it when he wrote this in response to Joe Barton’s foolish outburst the other day.
There are many ways to distinguish between the two major political parties in the United States, but one of the more obvious ways is in how they choose to implode. Democrats, for example, tend to implode in slow motion, when their own aimless, plodding inertia turns them into lugubrious and easy targets for the right wing media, which scurries around them, draping yet another thin, disingenuous stratum of “they’re socialist grandmother killers!” over them until the whole sludgy edifice collapses from the accumulated weight, and the Democrats are crushed underneath. Republicans, on the other hand, implode like old, fat, gassy stars, when the depleted fuel of their empty ideology can’t sustain further inward pressure from their personal idiocy, and the whole mess sucks down and then spectacularly erupts into a blazing display of abject stupidity.
But he’s not through with Barton and the Republicans.
And then you have something like what happened yesterday, when Texas representative and ranking Republican member of the house’s energy and commerce committee Joe Barton apologized to BP for having to endure the “shakedown” of agreeing to put $20 billion in an escrow account to help pay for the damages the company inflicted on the Gulf of Mexico. Shortly thereafter Barton was forced by the Republican leadership both to apologize for his apology and to retract it, which he did, in exactly the same manner a 10-year-old boy whose mother is standing behind him with a well-used wooden spoon apologizes to his sister for putting a dog turd in her bed. Barton didn’t apologize because he felt he did or said anything wrong; he did it because the alternative — losing his standing on the energy and commerce committee — would be more painful.
It’s this fact which is the real problem for the Republicans. The Republican leadership is righteously pissed off at Barton at the moment, but the question not answered is: Is it pissed off because he said something that does not reflect the Republican point of view on the escrow account, or is it pissed off because Barton, the House GOP point man on energy, was stupid enough to say it out loud at a congressional hearing?
I think we know the answer to that one. The Republican party has always been the party of the oligarchs and so Barton’s remarks were damaging at a time the are trying to convince the populist tea party otherwise.