Said a "GOP leadership aide" to Politico about the prospect of a government shutdown: "It’s obvious that we have the more reasonable position."
And you know what? He believes that. I've no doubt whatsoever that he honestly believes that, just as I'm sure that some on the left believe their own delusions -- e.g., that Wisconsin voters could not possibly have known what wicked schemes candidate Scott Walker was up to, hence those voters were "tricked" and deceived -- are not delusions at all, but honest assessments of today's political landscape.
Here's the thing. Republicans' singular objective since 1933 has been to return this nation to 1932. You can pretty much add a period to that, and leave it there, since there's little else of any altering import to add. Sure, there have been times of two-party peaceful coexistence or even detente. But fundamentally, and throughout, the Republican goal has been the destruction of anything New Dealish, and that includes, to borrow the GOP aide's presumption of obviousness, the collective bargaining rights of labor unions, whether public or private.
How, especially these days, any Wisconsin voter could have missed this primal reality of reactionary Republican intent is, as I wrote yesterday, simply beyond me. How often and how loudly must Republican pols scream it? -- not in their campaigns, for heaven's sake, which they're quite unlikely to do, but in their elected and official acts?
Yet the party line, according to some on the true-believing left (whom I heard repeatedly on MSNBC last night), should nonetheless be that Wisconsin voters were indeed duped. Candidate Walker never expressed that as governor he'd do what he's doing. So, according to the true believers, true democracy has been denied.
A pleasant fallacy, perhaps, but good grief, how utterly assbackward. True democracy implies informed voters -- the opposite of which, in Wisconsin, there happened to be a plurality.
They weren't tricked or deceived; they just didn't know what they voting for -- when they should have.