Suicide Should Be Painless

WARNING: Contains violence

Is it possible the GOP doesn't yet realize it's in a suicide pact?

Because they continue to do stuff that looks suicidal, yet they do them as if they're Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." (Not Robert DeNiro in The Deerhunter.) Full of earnest good resolve that they're doing the absolute right thing for America. And for themselves.

But to me, looks like playing lethal games of chance with more than one chamber loaded. Why do they continue making people hate them? In North Carolina, the Republican General Assembly went tyrannical and power-hunger and obnoxious after the 2010 Tea Party Revolution. They decided to be obvious about it because they'd gerrymandered themselves into unassailable seats of power.

Even a castle can be swamped by a wave.

More voters are watching. More nominally educated voters. And more of them are pissed. Maybe, as we enter 2018 and the end of a whole blessed year of Donald Trump, maybe NC voters are more pissed at Trump than at Phil Berger, but they're pissed enough to want to take down anybody that reminds them of Trump.

The Magic 8-Ball sez, 2018 ain't gonna be a Republican year.

So you'd think they'd be quieter about their ambitions. Less obnoxious. (Even Virginia Foxx learned to say fewer stupid, hateful things in public.) But no. The Phil Berger General Assembly has launched a new power-grab and the most obnoxious yet: He's monkeying with the judicial system, with the ultimate goal of giving himself the power to appoint the guys he wants wearing the robes.

He don't seem to care that voters are paying attention. Berger goes right on grabbing, even the blade-end of knives.

The GOP's own suburbs -- the very neighborhoods where they drive to their big houses from work in Raleigh and Charlotte and Winston-Salem and Greensboro -- are becoming less congenial. Other good candidates are announcing for office, and new faces are winning elections. Especially Democrat faces. (Virginia is for lovers!)

C/Net

But there's no reactive nor self-protective toning of it down by the Republicans running the General Assembly, no discernible attempt to come back to a middle ground, no moderating. It's a sight to behold and marvel at, like a man gathering a crowd and then willfully walking off a bridge.

Now that's just North Carolina. Nationally, the Trump tax bill they're about to pass in Washington doesn't look particularly healthy for Republicans facing the voters. The voting public hates the tax bill, 2 to 1, because they're probably onto the motives and the effects. They hate it like they hated ending Obamacare. Like they should hate Twitter by now. Like they really hate the assassination of net neutrality.

Office-holders huffed on power maybe don't notice what's obvious to others. They don't hear the bullet that kills them.