Sherman's March to the Sea, staring Paul Ryan and the GOP

Quote of the Day, from Taegan Goddard:

"I spoke to seven different Republican Senators, who said, `Joe, I'm not going to be able to help you on anything. The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can't let you succeed in anything. That's our ticket to coming back.'"
-- Vice President Joe Biden, quoted by Greg Sargent from Michael Grunwald's new book,The New New Deal.

The politics of slash-and-burn have really become part of the GOP's 'best practices' platform even when challenging supposed RINOs in their respective primaries. I think it's revealing that the conservative elite are either willing to tolerate the almost total separation of the party platforms from reality in the name of electoral victory, or so terrified of being 'Frumed' that they rarely even second guess the madness.

By this point I think any democrat or independent pol still trying for serious bipartisan compromise is deluding themselves. To use a war analogy, once you develop nuclear weapons there isn't any sound strategical way to ever get rid of them. When any tacit 'rule of war' is broken, it's difficult to put the cat back in the bag until either the current war reaches a conclusion or both sides suffer catastrophic defeats. I don't like this status quo, in fact I hate it and worry that we have little idea how bad it can get.   Unfortunately I  don't see how it can be changed in the near to medium future. The best option for the left, and for the remaining sane moderates and conservatives is to fight the war we're in and hope some of the saner leaders can outlast it.

The demographic trends give me hope for the Democrats and more importantly for a more moderate electorate in the long term. But unless the economy kicks off very quickly and stays that way I foresee continually increasing radicalization on the right, inevitably causing radicalization on the left. For the Democrats to do otherwise, from a game-theory point of view would be to simply surrender their goals again and again until there is no field left to play on. What we've seen in the maneuvering on the debt-ceiling extensions seems like a text-book example of chicken only the damage grows worse even before the government shut-down. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we going to hit the debt-ceiling again come January? AND the Bush Tax cuts will expire AND the sequestration cuts are all looming...

It's going to be a rocky couple of months for sure....

(Hat tip Collin, from FB)