… Fortunately for Boehner, he’s probably bagged enough Democrat votes, by way of his backroom deals and quid pro quo, cross-party-lines DC “friendships,” to overcome a serious challenge — itself a snapshot into the wretched state of the national GOP under the “leadership” of the establicans and their cronies, lobbyists, and Beltway insiders.
ICYMI, Gohmert made the announcement on FOX this morning …
…then released a statement:
After the November elections gave Republicans control of the Senate, voters made clear they wanted change. There have been numerous examples of problematic Republican leadership, but we were hopeful our leaders got the voters’ message. However, after our Speaker forced through the CRomnibus by passing it with Democratic votes and without time to read it, it seemed clear that we needed new leadership. There had been much discussion. But, until yesterday, no one had stepped up.
I applaud my friend Rep. Ted Yoho for putting his name forward as an alternative to the status quo. Ted is a good man for whom I could vote, but I have heard from many supporters and also friends in Congress who have urged me to put forward my name for Speaker as well to increase our chances of change. That is why I am also offering my name as a candidate for Speaker.
There is false information being floated that any Republican candidates in addition to the current Speaker will split the vote and give the Speaker’s gavel to Congresswoman Pelosi. This is nothing but a scare tactic to keep the current regime in power.
As long as Republicans vote for an adult American citizen for Speaker, no Democrat can win. Only if 59 Republicans voted “Present” would there be a chance for a Democrat to win.
To win the Speaker’s race, an adult American citizen has to get a clear majority of all Members of Congress on the House floor voting for an eligible person. Voting “Present” simply reduces the number of votes required to win a majority. If no one wins a majority on the first ballot, then we go to a second vote, then a third, until someone gets a majority.
At this point, the Speaker’s election is not about a particular candidate. It is about whether we keep the status quo or make the change the country demands. I am putting forward my name for consideration as Speaker and hope that with a new Speaker, be that me or someone else, we can fight for the ideals and principles that the voters wanted when they elected us in November.
Unsurprisingly, at least to me, the GOP rah-rah crowd has already discounted Goehmert’s hat toss as “unserious,” etc. — so inured have they become to the insular aristocracy that keeps us from effectively changing our elected leaders.
That is, they’d rather look jaded and be proven correct when we are unable to overcome increasingly cynical institutionalized obstacles, than fight for the kind of real change that is necessary should DC ever be brought back to heel. (Eg., lots of charts and the like being show around right now about how the GOP leadership has cut federal spending by 20%, with those numbers meant to gull us into believing that a decrease in the rate of spending by a full-bore progressive trifecta under Obama, Pelosi, and Reid is actually a decrease in any other place than the District of self-serving swamplands.)
Boehner lied — yes, lied — about how he would run his Speakership. He’s alienated fully 25% of the party. And when, in a representative government, 60% of your constituency — the people who put the party in power — wants a change to the party’s leadership (including even John Hinderaker, who generally is far more reluctant than I to buck the party, he being a sober analyst and I an emotional trainwreck), well, then it’s time for Boehner to stop serving himself and his cronies and get off the stage. Leaving behind a little puddle of maudlin orangey tears.
I’ve begun to put out the call to those conservatives elected in to the House in this last wave election. We can and should hold every Republican accountable for his or her vote here. Because all we’ve gotten with Boehner is kabuki theater and backroom deals — along with efforts to defang conservatives instead of the Marxists and liberal fascists who are running things nowadays. Who Boehner and the boys can work with, if given some backroom wheeler-dealer time.
Related: more on Yoho here.
I have only one question for both Reps. Gohmert and Yoho: Will either see to it that Articles of Impeachment are are filed against the current occupant of the White House?
hopey changey news
Revolution: Only 16% of GOP Voters Support Boehner and McConnell for Leadership of New Congress
That many?
This Speakership fight might see another Mississippi primary – Thad Cochrane outcome, with our GOP Ruling Class junior partners begging aid from their cross-aisle friends, to achieve a mutually satisfactory end: stopping any real threat of real change to their comfortable status quo.
I’m convinced there’s never going to be any significant political course changes until their status quo is made extremely uncomfortable.
ot
“No justice, no quiche!”
Good for both Yoho and Gohmert, but am I wrong to like Boehner’s odds in a 3-way race?
I agree that there will not be any significant political change until the landscape changes significantly. As long as they can continue to deny reality, they will.
> but am I wrong to like Boehner’s odds in a 3-way race?<
217 be the number. keep orangeman from having a majority. next ballot.
mia love: you want the losers?
Mia Love: ‘We Need To Move On’ From Steve Scalise Controversy
Steely Dan – “Black Friday”
steely dan – the royal scam
The List Grows: Reps Dave Brat & Steve King Will Not Vote For Boehner for Speaker
Members of the Republican Caucus of the House who have their eyes open and their ears receptive to plain facts will notice that at the very moment of challenge to its entrenched power interests the Boehner PowerForPower’sSakeClique reaches its lowest depths of desperately vicious arm-twisting, collegial conduct threatening, along with any vacuous pseudo-friendly cajoling and simple demagogic nastiness. Political-philosophical vision, you ask? Yeah, such personal and narrow parochial stuff is at the heart of the sole vision belonging to the power-brokers, for such are their genuine concerns.
We’ll see whether the Republicans recognize their peril at this moment. Most, of course, we can estimate, will not. However, if a sufficient number step forward to make any pause in the robotic process, perhaps some of those who now buckle to the pressures exerted by the Boehner PowerForPower’sSakeClique — possibly doing so against their better judgment (and ignoring the lesson Va. District Seven sought to teach) — will find the courage to make the necessary change. Otherwise, we ought to expect that formerly grand old party to eventually go the way of the dodo, and that sooner than later.
Go the way of the Dodo and the Whig Party.
Boehner’s fate is in Kevin McCarthy’s hands.
Boehner’s fate is in Kevin McCarthy’s hands.
That could be a hopeful sign, eh? Or is McCarthy a competent-enough thug?
I’m thinking that if it starts looking like it will go to a second ballot, McCarthy might discover he has a wart on his fanny that only the Speaker’s Chair can soothe.
> Or is McCarthy a competent-enough thug?<
these clowns are paper tigers. too bad the cons don't recognize that like baracky does.
I actually remember a “Speaker McCarthy” — California Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy, a Democrat.
I used to call him Tail-Gunner Leo but nobody else did.
klu klux kommunist news
Conservative Blog Hacked for Posting Top Secret, Racist #BlackBrunch Protest Manual
The 1924 Democratic National Convention, also called the Klanbake
perhaps
Until The Whole World Hears
>Yet, as we have seen, ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important component of power, a pillar providing it with both excusatory legitimacy and an inner coherence. As this aspect grows in importance, and as it gradually loses touch with reality, it acquires a peculiar but very real strength. It becomes reality itself, albeit a reality altogether self-contained, one that on certain levels (chiefly inside the power structure) may have even greater weight than reality as such. Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it. The significance of phenomena no longer derives from the phenomena themselves, but from their locus as concepts in the ideological context. Reality does not shape theory, but rather the reverse. Thus power gradually draws closer to ideology than it does to reality; it draws its strength from theory and becomes entirely dependent on it. This inevitably leads, of course, to a paradoxical result: rather than theory, or rather ideology, serving power, power begins to serve ideology. It is as though ideology had appropriated power from power, as though it had become dictator itself. It then appears that theory itself, ritual itself, ideology itself, makes decisions that affect people, and not the other way around.
If ideology is the principal guarantee of the inner consistency of power, it becomes at the same time an increasingly important guarantee of its continuity. Whereas succession to power in classical dictatorship is always a rather complicated affair (the pretenders having nothing to give their claims reasonable legitimacy, thereby forcing them always to resort to confrontations of naked power), in the post-totalitarian system power is passed on from person to person, from clique to clique, and from generation to generation in an essentially more regular fashion. In the selection of pretenders, a new “king-maker” takes part: it is ritual legitimation, the ability to rely on ritual, to fulfill it and use it, to allow oneself, as it were, to be borne aloft by it. Naturally, power struggles exist in the post-totalitarian system as well, and most of them are far more brutal than in an open society, for the struggle is not open, regulated by democratic rules, and subject to public control, but hidden behind the scenes. (It is difficult to recall a single instance in which the First Secretary of a ruling Communist Party has been replaced without the various military and security forces being placed at least on alert.) This struggle, however, can never (as it can in classical dictatorships) threaten the very essence of the system and its continuity. At most it will shake up the power structure, which will recover quickly precisely because the binding substance—ideology—remains undisturbed. No matter who is replaced by whom, succession is only possible against the backdrop and within the framework of a common ritual. It can never take place by denying that ritual.
Because of this dictatorship of the ritual, however, power becomes clearly anonymous. Individuals are almost dissolved in the ritual. They allow themselves to be swept along by it and frequently it seems as though ritual alone carries people from obscurity into the light of power. Is it not characteristic of the post-totalitarian system that, on all levels of the power hierarchy, individuals are increasingly being pushed aside by faceless people, puppets, those uniformed flunkeys of the rituals and routines of power?
The automatic operation of a power structure thus dehumanized and made anonymous is a feature of the fundamental automatism of this system. It would seem that it is precisely the diktats of this automatism which select people lacking individual will for the power structure, that it is precisely the diktat of the empty phrase which summons to power people who use empty phrases as the best guarantee that the automatism of the post-totalitarian system will continue.
Western Sovietologists often exaggerate the role of individuals in the post-totalitarian system and overlook the fact that the ruling figures, despite the immense power they possess through the centralized structure of power, are often no more than blind executors of the system’s own internal laws-laws they themselves never can, and never do, reflect upon. In any case, experience has taught us again and again that this automatism is far more powerful than the will of any individual; and should someone possess a more independent will, he must conceal it behind a ritually anonymous mask in order to have an opportunity to enter the power hierarchy at all. And when the individual finally gains a place there and tries to make his will felt within it, that automatism, with its enormous inertia, will triumph sooner or later, and either the individual will be ejected by the power structure like a foreign organism, or he will be compelled to resign his individuality gradually, once again blending with the automatism and becoming its servant, almost indistinguishable from those who preceded him and those who will follow. (Let us recall, for instance, the development of Husák or Gomukka.) The necessity of continually hiding behind and relating to ritual means that even the more enlightened members of the power structure are often obsessed with ideology. They are never able to plunge straight to the bottom of naked reality, and they always confuse it, in the final analysis, with ideological pseudo-reality. (In my opinion, one of the reasons the Dub?ek leadership lost control of the situation in 1968 was precisely because, in extreme situations and in final questions, its members were never capable of extricating themselves completely from the world of appearances.)
It can be said, therefore, that ideology, as that instrument of internal communication which assures the power structure of inner cohesion is, in the post-totalitarian system, some thing that transcends the physical aspects of power, something that dominates it to a considerable degree and, therefore, tends to assure its continuity as well. It is one of the pillars of the system’s external stability. This pillar, however, is built on a very unstable foundation. It is built on lies. It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie.
link
# live within the lie.
go forth and twitter
And they are willing to live within the Lie because it is all they have. Their whole existence, their whole worth to themselves lies in believing in the wretched thing.
While Ideologues are the creators and spreaders of The Big Lie, in it’s many forms, they are dependent for their ‘sanity’ on continuing to believe in The Biggest Lie: their System Of Ideas, their Ideology.
All Ideologies are fragile things.
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