Crazy No More?

The other day Tom Fetzer, a longtime GOP consultant, fundraiser-turned-lobbyist, and former chair of the NC GOP, commented that he thought that 2015 in the NC General Assembly could generate "perhaps a more normal agenda for the legislature on more traditional issues," like jobs and the economy.

"More normal." More normal, as in not abnormal? More normal, as in not warped by too much power and too little humanity? As in, "we knocked down the building. Now it's time to neatly stack the bricks"?

So are we to understand that the new Republican majority in the General Assembly did all the damage they ever intended between 2011 and 2014 -- got that out of their system -- and are now ready to make a thousand flowers bloom? Nothing else to dismantle, strangle, deprive of oxygen? Just the reaping of the blessings now, letting the new conservative utopia grow great, with the benevolent rich teaching us peons the beauty of austerity and giving us occasional part-time work waxing their Mercedes?

That would be "more normal," right?

Or is it the new normal, sort of like the extremes of weather that have become routine because of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Certainly, the Raleigh Republicans have spewed tons of pollution into our political atmosphere during the last four years. They've breathed their own emanations and convinced themselves that the poor will accept whatever they dish out, that the unemployed will accept being treated like cur dogs, that teachers will accept crumbs, that voters will accept every attempt to make voting more difficult.

We're not about to believe that the clown college has removed its make-up, retired its fright-wigs. Unless, of course, they really are nervous about another election cycle coming in 2016, with their patsy governor threatened and a turn-out that may overwhelm them.