Dear Dirty America

Hands above the covers, Washington!  Grover Norquist has got out his flashlight, on the hunt for salacious wetdreaming from his Republican House majority members.  The new congress hasn’t even been sworn into office, and already two Republican senators and a congressman have publicly backed from “The Pledge”.  So the story goes:

Norquist said his group would “certainly highlight who has kept their commitment and who hasn’t” when it comes time for lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Peter King to run for re-election, though Norquist claimed voters generally decide on their own to oust elected officials who vote to raise taxes. …[He adds that] “No pledge taker has voted for a tax increase. You’ve had some people discussing impure thoughts on national television,” he said.

While in no way conferred any public responsibilities and directly accountable to no one, Norquist is considered by many[1] to be a key figure in modern American conservatism, and the Republican Party by extension.  His group, Americans for Tax Reform, arranged a pledge at the beginning of the 2012 election wherein its signatories promised to in no way increase marginal tax rates on either persons or businesses, except in the case of matching (1:1) cuts in spending.

The intractability of the pledge has since generated substantial controversy, with Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) blaming it for the inefficacy of congressional debt talks and the approaching fiscal cliff.

There was a revealing CBS interview with Grover in which he was asked whether he would metaphorically drown government in the bathtub, best of all possible worlds considered.

“No,” he responded.  “We want it down to the size to where it would fit in a bathtub.  And then it could worry about what we were up to.  …  We functioned in this country with government at eight percent of GDP for a long time and quite well.”

Norquist’s dream for a uniform-platform Republican Party came at the age of twelve, when instead of masturbating as his peers a young Grover volunteered for Nixon’s 1968 campaign. “If the parties would brand themselves the way Coke and Pepsi and other products do so that you knew what you were buying, it had quality control. I vote for the Republican. He or she will not raise my taxes. I’ll buy one. I’ll take that one home.”

Any heterogeneity is inexcusable.  “’Cause let’s say you take that Coke bottle home, and you get home, and you’re two thirds of the way through the Coke bottle. And you look down at what’s left in your Coke bottle is a rat head there. You wonder whether you’d buy Coke ever again. You go on TV, and you show ’em the rat head in the Coke bottle. You call your friends, and tell them about it. And Coke’s in trouble. Republicans who vote for a tax increase are rat heads in a Coke bottle. They damage the brand for everyone else.”

Akin to Protestant sexual mores of ‘in the heart’ – a theological time paradox in which a sin thought is as potent as (and so more dangerous than) one done – the ideologically impure thoughts of senators Graham & Chambliss and representative King are tantamount to one-handed nocturnal defection.  Though the sticky muck America finds itself covered in is arguably the result of a Congress mired in ideological self-espousal, rather than any bizarre bipartisan fantasizing.

*

---