OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Boehner Bunglers
The federal government
is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic
consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?
The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting
can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and
Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has
become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the
inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise;
unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and
dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
