Charles Pierce on Republican'ts

[Sorry, kids, but this is not the way the system is supposed to work. This whole puppet show was the result of a jerry-rigged burlesque of the legislative process that was devised a year ago because the House had been rendered dysfunctional by a claque of feral children. This whole puppet show likely will be replayed — with even more spectacular special effects! — in March when we deal with Fiscal Cliff 2: Sequester Boogaloo because of jerry-rigged burlesques that are part of this new deal of which everyone is so very proud. My man Chuck Todd is calling the sequel, "March Madness." If the pundits are already being cutesy about it, the March thing could be a nightmare.

This is a continuation, not of the proper constitutional order of things, but of Government By Improv. There is no serious coalition in evidence here, no matter how many Democrats offered themselves up to defibrillate John Boehner's career. This was a deal cobbled together by the vice-president and the minority leader of the Senate and passed by a Republican House with more Democratic votes than Republican votes. This leaves the government still in a weird, suspended place, creating tiny mechanisms within itself on the fly just to keep running, and then newer tiny mechanisms on the fly to keep the previous tiny mechanisms running. Sooner or later, you can't improvise your way out of your basic problems, which is that one of your two political parties continues to have a kind of prion disease eating away at its brain. This deal last night did not extinguish the nihilistic streak in the Republican party, nor its delight in legislative vandalism.]
Read more: Fiscal Cliff Averted - And The Debt Deal Winner Is...Somebody - Esquire http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/fiscal-cliff-averted-010213#ixzz2Gq5gu4d9