The Superior Cluster

Via LauraW, the spectre of returning to the minority has Crazy Nancy's number one decaying from bipolarism into outright schitzophrenia.

Steny Hoyer, a month ago:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Tuesday that tax increases will eventually be necessary to address the nation's mounting debt, raising a difficult election-year issue as Democrats fight retain control of Congress. In the shorter term, Hoyer raised the possibility that Congress will only temporarily extend middle-class tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year. He pointedly suggested that making them permanent would be too costly.

Steny Hoyer, yesterday:

“We have no intention of allowing the Republican tax increase — that their policies would lead to — to go into effect for working Americans. Period,” he said. “We’re going to act and make sure that the Republican phase out and increase in taxes does not end as they provided for in the laws they passed.”

Every time I say I've seen everything, something else happens that I never even conceived of. And I haven't even used that expression lately. But I'm sorely tempted to say it now, because I never imagined that any Democrat would ever become as malevolently deranged as Nancy Pelosi is. But Steny Hoyer has now managed it.

One of LauraW's commenters saves me the trouble and time of looking up the details Crazy Steny is attempting to defenestrate:

I think NOW would be a good time to remind people that the ONLY reason those tax cuts are sunsetting is because Democrats filibustered making them permanent in the first place.

Republicans had to pass the tax cuts through reconciliation as a budget measure which means that they had to sunset per the rules of reconciliation because Democrats refused to even make them IN THE FIRST PLACE.

So yeah, let's TALK about the sunsetting of those tax cuts. I, for one, WELCOME, the discussion.

LauraW calls this "sweet reeking desperation". I think that overcredits it with enough coherence to still be categorizable. This is historical revisionist frakkery so gibberingly pollaexing I don't frankly know WHAT to call it.

Maybe Hoyer is trying to render Republicans irrelevant by having Democrats debate themselves? At this rate of descent into mental irregularity, the only reason any Donk hands will be raised on Election night is to get the arms they're attached to into their straitjackets.

***Better pack plenty of drammamine when riding shotgun with returning-to-private-life-in-the-very-near-future Paul Hodes:

1) He joined his House Donk colleagues in pushing another indolent subsidy not paid for by their own much-balleyhood-and-phonier-than-Paris-Hilton's-boobs PayGo turnstile.

2) He joined his House Donk colleagues in sliming minority Republicans who were happy to keep subsidizing the indolent if only it would be paid for rather than grafted onto the deficit as "extremist, obstructionist, lying hypocrites".

3) After the oligatory GOP el foldo, Hodes....didn't bother to stick around to contribute his vote to "helping the neediest":

After repeatedly prodding his Republican opponents in the U.S. Senate race to support extending unemployment benefits, Democratic U.S. Representative Paul Hodes last week missed the vote.

A spokesman for the Hodes campaign said an unspecified “scheduling issue” prevented the congressman from voting July 22 when the U.S. House approved restoring jobless pay for millions of Americans who had been out of work six months or more. Spokesman Matt House said Hodes remains a strong supporter of extended benefits.

Hodes was scheduled to appear in Las Vegas the next day at the liberal bloggers convention Netroots Nation, and by Saturday afternoon he had told a Huffington Post reporter at the conference that Republicans who opposed the extension were “extremist, obstructionist, lying hypocrites who think you don’t have to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest but are holding up help for the neediest.”

And Hodes wonders why he can't even get to forty percent against ANYBODY.

On the plus side, he's now entrant #4 in the "Quit, Charlie, Quit!" chorus, but he won't return any of Rangel's campaign cash. Almost as if he were an "extremist, obstructionist, lying hypocrite" who thinks you don't have to pay for subsidies to the indolent but is too damned chowderheaded to admit that tax cuts DON'T HAVE TO BE "PAID FOR" BECAUSE THE FEDS NEVER GET THEIR GREEDY, GRUBBY HOOVES ON THAT CASH TO BEGIN WITH.

But then you can be an asshole to your heart's content....in private life.

***I don't know if Jim Jordan (R-OH4) is a teacher by profession, but if he isn't, he's certainly got the talent for it:

His amendment reducing spending back to FY'08 levels, saving a trillion bucks in the process and multiples of that going forward, wasn't offered with the expectation that it was ever going to see the light of day. It was, rather, an illustration. A picture of the breed of insane, authoritarian, economically destructive creatures that dominate the United States government and has generated such profound fear, revulsion, disgust, and boiling anger throughout the American electorate. The Jordan amendment keeps the counter-Narrative rolling toward November, and keeps the Ruling Party - which, per the Hoyer example, is literally cracking up - on the run.

***Make no mistake, brothers and sisters, if the Democrats are going to go down - and, ooooh yeeeaaaah, they are - they are going to go down spending:

A Democratic spending fight broke out behind closed doors Thursday, as party leaders successfully pressured four junior lawmakers not to offer an amendment slashing housing and transportation programs by $1.02 billion.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey argued passionately against the amendment and its authors — though not by name — in a speech to the Democratic Caucus in the morning, according to Democratic insiders. He pointed to the importance of the targeted programs and noted that the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development spending bill’s bottom line of $67.4 billion is less than the $68.7 billion proposed by the president, sources said.

“Obey got up there, and he was pissed,” said a senior Democratic aide.

He was quickly backed up by House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson (D-CT1), who urged fellow Democrats to lobby the amendment’s sponsors, Representatives Gary Peters of Michigan, Jim Himes of Connecticut, Peter Welch of Vermont and John Adler of New Jersey not to offer their plan.

For the record: Obey, retiring because he was going down; Larson, safe; Peters, Himes, and Adler, going down; Welch - c'mon, he's from frickin' Vermont.

What strikes me is Obey's vehemence. His party has the annual federal....wait, they don't actually HAVE a "budget" as conventionally understood anymore, do they? How about "tab"? Yes, that should work - Obey's party has the annual federal tab up to nearly FOUR TRILLION dollars a year, yes? So why would he possibly get pissed over a comparative (yes, I'm really typing these words) pittance like a billion smackers? That's 0.025% (one four-thousandth) of the total annual federal....tab. Two percent of the particular appropriations bill in question. Chickenfeed. Deminimus. Folding money. Change in your basement couch.

The only analogy I can think of that psychologically fits the available observations is the angry denial phase of somebody who's been given a terminal diagnosis. A date of death both soon and certain. Not just an inconvenience, or a health setback, or a tough, scary surgery that can be weathered and endured and recovered from in time. But the end. Finito, do not pass go, take your final bows.

The electoral disaster rolling towards the Democrats isn't the normal first-midterm-election adjustment for the Ruling Party. It isn't even the backlash that engulfed them after La Clinton Nostra tried to nationalize health care in 1994. This is epochal. This is a unified people acting in self-defense against an all-out totalitarian onslaught launched and waged against them by the government many of them helped elect just two years ago. The American political immune system launching an all-out counter-assault against a lethal invading ideologically foreign pathogen. After the 2010 election, Democrats can expect to be lost in the political wilderness for a lot longer than a dozen years this time. It may be an exile as generational as they sneeringly consigned the GOP to as recently as last year.

It is a political extinction level event....

....and Hoyer and Obey and the rest of them know it. And while newbies like Peters, Himes, and Adler frantically strive to save their own skins, their leaders are realizing that however much they can save on November 2nd, they're still going to lose most of it. And thereafter, at least for them, it'll never be the same.

***And yet for others, nothing will change at all:

The back-to-back trials of a pair of black lawmakers represent an unprecedented use of an ethics adjudication system that has rarely been used by House members accused of breaking House rules…

POLITICO first reported earlier this week that the committee was expected to unveil its charges against Waters before leaving town for the recess.

Her decision to go to trial appears to have postponed the release of the committee’s formal charging document, called a “Statement of Alleged Violation.”…

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have complained that the OCE has unfairly and disproportionately targeted them, and many have signed onto a legislative effort to de-fang the office.

Yeah - use of an ethics adjudication system to wield their racial supremacism as a faux moral bludgeon against their terrified co-partisans in protection of their corruption rackets thoroughly entrenched in the gerrymandered concrete. Now that Rangel has sounded the "C'mon in, the water's fine!" all-clear, I wouldn't be surprised to see this Donk ethics romp become like the swimming pool scene in Caddyshack: