Sufferers of ADD - Attention Deficit Disorder (see BeatADD.com for some funny and compassionate material on the modern malady; thanks for the poster) - please forgive my confusing your situation with that of the US Republican party. Whatever the cause of ADD, it appears to be completely involuntary, whereas what is ailing the GOP is entirely of its own doing.
Take the outburst of Republican Congressman Joe Wilson (from South Carolina) last night during President Obama's address to the joint session of Congress. Blurting out "You lie!!" (see WaPo's Dana Milbank's article and video) to the President was not only a historic breach of etiquette and protocol, it was also, like his colleagues' brandishing anti-health care reform signs, entirely premeditated.
Republicans came to the Rotunda ready to diss the Prez, who was not displaying sufficient "humility," as Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia said on the eve of the address. Coming as he does from a state where people of the President's complexion were addressed as "boy" not so long ago, Chambliss' racial reference was understood by all with a memory of the coded language.
"The practitioners of the "Big Lie" (and they have the audacity to label Obama a "fascist") have assimilated the lesson of the people who invented fascism: lie early, lie often, and lie big."
The practitioners of the "Big Lie" (and they have the audacity to label Obama a "fascist") have assimilated the lesson of the people who invented fascism: lie early, lie often, and lie big. Like their professed concern about adding to the federal deficit, nicely trashed today by the ever watchful (and always funny) Gail Collins in the NYT:
These guys are really, really, really concerned about balancing the budget. And that seems only fair since they were basically the ones who unbalanced it in the first place when they worked in splendid bipartisan concert in 2001 to pass George W. Bush’s first $1.6 trillion in tax cuts.
"These guys" include Senators Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley, respectively Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who hold the future of health care reform in their SDD-trembling hands. But Bush's deficits - his trillion dollar tax cuts wiped out the Clinton surplus - willfully committed while he was leading the country to a war of choice in Iraq on the national credit card, are conveniently forgotten by the GOP. Just like the huge deficits of the Reagan/Bush I era, which Clinton had to erase before he created the surplus, which was wiped out by Bush II...
Selectivity over deficits is just politics, you might say. Perhaps. But it might also be a sign of a breakdown. Consider what the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has to say about ADHD, then substitute "GOP" for "child" (particularly after last night's behavior):
- Impulsiveness: a child who acts quickly without thinking first.
- Hyperactivity: a child who can't sit still, walks, runs, or climbs around when others are seated, talks when others are talking.
- Inattention: a child who daydreams or seems to be in another world, is sidetracked by what is going on around him or her.
As Bob Herbert said the other day, maybe "It's Time to Get Help."