Oh, these guys are good.
Sen. Bernie Sanders just unleashed on the Senate floor an impassioned surgical strike on their bootless talking points: he excoriated their indefensible advocacy of further coddling America's exceptionally comfortable while "the middle class is collapsing" and "poverty is increasing"; after which, once they're successful in securing the indefensible, they'll rail about fresh rounds of deficit explosions, which of course will lead to their even fresher demands for draconian entitlement reductions for the collapsing middle class and the expanding poor.
Enter Sen. Jon Kyl, who, projecting an almost comically pitiable image of Virtue and Reason scorned, pleaded that we "just heard" (from Sen. Sanders, that is) why this tax debate has been so doggone difficult. Republicans, in their customary "spirit of cooperation," he continued, have merely wanted to reach common ground with Democrats. The latter have insisted on instead playing to their base, causing complications and delays and unnecessary contentiousness.
I just about did the coffee-spit thing, but I swear by early afternoon Kyl & Co. may move me to bourbon. Only a chemically altered consciousness could countenance with any weekend equanimity what should be received by the world's oldest representative democracy as nothing but scandalous villainy.
The toxic charm of Kyl's naked disingenuity, though, was his hangdog demeanor -- rehearsed and polished for, what else, the primary GOP base. He and his fellow Republican lawmakers are, one predatory filibuster at a time, redefining American political grotesquery; which is to say, the once-Grand Old Party has adopted as a routine tactic the right-wing, Limbaugh-inspired talk-radio tactic of simply, duplicitously turning the tables on one's opponents.
To wit: if Republican pols are but cynically playing to their base, then their rhetorical offensive becomes that selfsame accusation against Democrats -- the ones, in this tax debate at least, with all the profoundly legitimate arguments.
Which in itself lethally corrupts the "traditionalism" -- that absolute philosophical bedrock -- of conceptual conservatism; the tradition, that is, of personal honor and only honorable political pursuits.
In short, modern Republicans aren't merely destroying conservatism through idiotic and indisputably pseudoconservative policy demands, but through the very manner in which they make those demands.