Detention for Middle School Kids

In “The Politics of Spite,” Paul Krugman decries the Republican Party’s devolvement to a puerile mentality of lurid attacks, absurd smears, and elephantine blindness. Their current psychology renders them incapable of compromise, unreceptive to reason, and grossly negligent in their poise; for should not leaders serve our country rather than the low pangs of their throne lust?

And yet Republicans would rather cheer Obama’s ‘failure’ to secure the 2012 Olympics than lament the collective loss. They would rather promulgate lies about death panels than unleash themselves from their sordid tether to the moguls of the health industry. They would rather react like tyrannic 8th graders, or as Krugman puts it, display “the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old,” than allow intelligent and cooperative dialogue to lead us out of misery brought on by eight years of W’s weasel-worthy war mongering and general incompetence.

Krugman is right to end by saying that any wise remedy for government deadlock must take into account this current immaturity. What he doesn’t tackle is the presence of a serious lurking risk: that the gimmie gimmie gimmie GOP will suffice as a breeding ground for fascism in all its anti-glory: ignorance, effigies, and tantruming scions of ultimate disgrace.