The bad guys on the planet, those of the Islamic murdering type, would love nothing more than to derail the American experiment in democracy and thus argue that an Islamic theocracy is a better option. If, while doing so, they could also put a major hurt on the economies of most of Western society, that would be an added bonus. They have no real capability of reeking such havoc in spite of their claims and propaganda. But no mind ...
...they have the T-party to do it for them.
It isn't clear that the T-party will succeed either. They have certainly done more real harm to more actual people than their paranoid illusions of the harm Obamacare will do. If they succeed in shoving the country over the default cliff there will be no comparison at all. And they are paranoid illusions. After all, this is a group that often claims the earth is 5000 years old, that evolution doesn't exit, that scientists are engaged in a liberal conspiracy by pointing out the climate is changing and the glaciers melting, and that teachers aren't important but derivatives are. These are also the people who claim that Obama is a socialist / terrorist / Muslim / non-American who was going to lose in a landslide to Mitt Romney. Their capacity for delusion is infinite, including the claim that attempting to overhaul an already failed health care industry is going to do more harm then shutting down the government and defaulting on the debt.
The good news is that the T-party may have finally burned one too many bridge. The rich people, who wrote the checks that got the T-party loons were they are, may be having second thoughts. Should the country default some of these same people are likely to take losses in the millions and millions of dollars. That would make the T-party a very bad investment indeed.
Which would be some weird kind of justice. At the moment it seems about 22% of Americans identify as "Republican" and, of that group about 40% identify with the T-party. That would mean less than 10% of the people in the US of A identity with the T-party. Without the big money provided by the Koch Brothers and their ilk, no one would ever have even heard of the T-party, let along voted a bunch of these fools into public office. Big money, pure corruption, and unabridged influence pedeling (thank you Supreme Court) brought the T-party to the fore. For the T-party to turn around and seriously fuck the wealthy elite who were trying to buy out democracy isn't without its humor.
A real puzzle is what a nation does to survive such an inside insurgency. They can't be ignored. They can't be removed from office quickly enough and they can't be arrested and put on trial. It may be that the country staggers through this T-party terrorism; coming out the other side seriously bloodied but still alive. Maybe, then, America finally rejects conservative ideology and crony capitalism as the colossal failures they have proved to be. Even this Supreme Court would be unable to stand against such a sea change; and they would certainly be replaced with Justices who have also rejected the old, failed ideology that legalized corruption instead of prosecuting it; that worked to restrict the civil and voting rights of Americans, and who insisted that their particular god was actually a follower of their particular political ideology.
Then again, since I tend to think the country is already lost, maybe we don't survive and this is just the last chapter in the fall of an empire. Should the T-party succeed in derailing democracy; temporarily inflicting their demented view of society on the 90% plus that is the rest of America, it would be a form of dictatorship regardless of what the media might call it. When THAT failed, and it certainly would, with it would go any remnant of the old America, its constitution, its capitalism, or its elitism. Perhaps even the old boarders would be lost. California, the East Coast, Hawaii, and Alaska would certainly break from a T-party dictatorship with its power base in Texas and the mid-West. Washington DC itself would be a T-party enclave near the southern end of a progressive leaning East Coast and lose any claim of being a political capital of a dismembered nation. The new "T-party / America" of the old Confederacy would be a backward, uneducated, utterly untenable society unable to survive long without the money flowing in from the rest of the country. Surrounded by progressive societies unfettered by T-party lunacy, even that last distorted remnant of the old America would fade from history rather quickly.
It would be a mess, for sure. But is is going to be a mess anyway sometime soon. Maybe the time is now?
