Impulse Control

via Digby (excerpts) The children are rewriting Democratic amendments to make them sound as if Democrats are trying to protect sexual predators. And no, this isn't happening in some obscure local backwater. It's in the US House of Representatives:...

Thank goodness the chairman of the committee stepped in and took control of his unruly charges.

Oh wait; he didn't. "And instead of decrying what I certainly expected would be revealed as a mistake by an overzealous staffer...The Chairman stood by those altered
amendment descriptions. "In fact...He said, and I quote..."You don't like what we wrote about your amendments, and we don't like what you said about our bill."

The problem is that these people don't really want to achieve anything. They are both in love with being victims and insist on being right. And they want everyone to acknowledge they are both right and victimized.

The Republican party has a bunch of action items and a bunch of constituencies who want specific things, but this erstwhile great party of sober, prudent conservatism has shown that when it comes to running the country is more like an wild gang of teen-agers, terrorizing the neighborhood and drawing graffitti on the capital building. They operate on impulses that they cannot control.

There is a strain of macho, pouty, puerile, "Lost Cause" psychology in American politics going back a long way. These same people wielding almost total power and attempting to run our government as an expression of their sense of righteous victimhood is a uniquely undignified and degrading spectacle.