These are the writers of "The Broken Branch" about Congress' dysfunction under the Bush admin. Apparently now it's even worse. Both parties have their issues, but the authors put the bulk of the blame on the GOP for espousing a dangerously extremist and dysfunctional position on most issues. And don't think that is a biased Bill Maher/New Yorker/liberal accusation, as one of the authors works at the American Enterprise Inst (and hasn't been fired for writing this book). This flies in the face of the typical "both parties are rotten and basically the same" argument, which masks GOP transgressions under an incorrect assumption of parity. Some critics may claim, "Come on, we always think present day is the worst ever, but in the long lens of history, past Congresses have been worse." Maybe so say the authors, but are we really comfortable comparing our current Congress to the one that couldn't resolve its differences and contributed to plunging the nation into the bloody Civil War? That's like saying the Afghan War is OK because it's not as bad as Vietnam.
This pretty much sums it up: "One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
So even though BO and his administration haven't been dream leaders, let's do what we can this election season to block these GOP cancers on our nation from gaining more power. Socioeconomically, they basically want to return the nation to the "grand old 1920's" (conveniently forgetting what their policies led to), and militarily they sound fairly similar to Bush with less bravado. Then after Nov, maybe we can pressure BO into some real gov't reforms as he should be more concerned about legacy than his future in politics.
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