The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn surveys the GOP's most recent extremism (Sens. Rubio and Inhofe on immigration and the environment, respectively) and concludes:
For Democrats thinking about their political prospects in 2016 and beyond, this is good news, given demographic trends. But for now and for the foreseeable future, Republican extremists have the power to block policy changes in Washington, thanks to Republican control of the House and their strong presence in the Senate. The real-world implications of this political situation are millions of people stuck in immigration limbo and a planet cooking to the point where damage is irreversible. That is nothing to celebrate.
The indelicacy of Cohn's final, finger-wagging observation is the sort of moral austerity in politics that we, or at least I, could easily do without. Of course the assigning of millions of people to an indeterminate purgatory and cooking the planet are acts unworthy of celebration to any but Republican imbeciles like Rubio, Inhofe & Followers. But to underscore Republicans' reprehensibility by sermonizing against Democrats' understandable schadenfreude over the opposition's tactical overreach is a puritanical act of Dudley-Do-Rightism I just don't buy.
Now honestly, Jonathan, can you tell us that you never celebrated as Bush-Cheney and their congressional allies sunk lower and lower into malfeasanced depravity and breathtaking turpitude? In the Bush administration's bumbling, nation-damaging ramp-ups to the 2006 and 2008 elections, did you not take a certain, transcendent delight? And as W. besmirched our honor and degraded every conceivable notion of managerial decency, did you not once think to yourself, Oh damn that's a shame, but I couldn't be happier?
Of course you did. It's the ineradicable nature of us carcass-eyeing political beasts. To pretend, as one of the pack, that you're anything but is unseemly.