On Facebook a few days ago, Matthew Rose posted this public status that’s making the rounds on my list of friends.

Oct 2008: “You’ll never get elected and pass healthcare.”
Nov 2008: “We’ll never let you pass healthcare.”
Jan 2009: “We are going to shout you down every time you try to pass healthcare.”
July 2009: “We will fight to the death every attempt you make to pass healthcare.”
Dec 2009: “We will destroy you if you even consider passing healthcare.”
March 2010: “We can’t believe you just passed healthcare.”
April 2010: “We are going to overturn healthcare.”
Sept 2010: “We are going to repeal healthcare.”
Jan 2011: “We are going to destroy healthcare.”
Feb 2012: “We are going to elect a candidate who will immediately revoke healthcare.”
June 2012: “We will go to the Supreme Court, and they will overturn healthcare.”
Aug 2012: “The American people will never re-elect you, because they don’t want healthcare.”
Oct 2012: “We can’t wait to win the election and explode healthcare.”
Nov 2012: “We can’t believe you just got re-elected and that we can’t repeal healthcare.”
Feb 2013: “We’re still going to vote to obliterate healthcare.”
June 2013: “We can’t believe the Supreme Court just upheld healthcare.”
July 2013: “We’re going to vote like 35 more times to erase healthcare.”
Sept 2013: “We are going to leverage a government shutdown into defunding, destroying, obliterating, overturning, repealing, dismantling, erasing and ripping apart healthcare.”
Oct 2013: “WHY AREN’T YOU NEGOTIATING???”

I woke up this morning, obsessed with a single thought:

If the GOP don’t think there’s anything bad about the letting the Debt Ceiling collapse, then why do they think holding it hostage will get them anything?

I’ve been chewing on this all night and I think I know.

I took the name Cassandra for a reason. It’s not my given name, never been called that in my life, but I begin to think I must be one of her descendants because I’m seeing where this is headed and I’m afraid the President is going to weaken his resolve before the 17th. This MUST NOT HAPPEN.

God Bless Bernie Sanders, because he’s preaching what I’m preaching.

I have been saying for well over a year now what some news organizations are only now reporting on their main pages. On October 5th, The New York Times said that there is no issue so important that it could possibly pull the House Tea Party from their brinkmanship because this is a carefully planned process and it’s proceeding according to their hopes.

NY Times: A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning

If for any reason you have failed to grasp what’s happening 10 days from now, worry no more. It’s going to happen. I’ve already sold one of my stocks and both the mutual funds (what’s left in my meager IRA), riding this one out with cash and stock in Yahoo and one Solar Energy company because I think they’ll survive this. That’s all. Everything else is cash because I simply can’t afford to lose what’s left of the teeny gains I’ve made in the last year.

Despite all the craziness on the Hill, Wall Street’s been reacting slowly. Why?

Here’s just one example, from an unlikely source, The Motley Fool:

Fool.com: Warren Buffett’s $10 Billion Financial Crisis Profits

Here’s another, from Slate.com:

Slate.com: Crisis? What Crisis? How House Republicans are convincing themselves that defaulting on the country’s debt wouldn’t be the disaster everybody claims it’d be.

I never once watched an episode of the X-files, but I can quote their tag line: “The truth is out there.” Just go look at the main sites for business: Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, pick one. This is where we should have been looking while the Obamacare smokescreen was in action. We haven’t paid attention. We’ve been too busy. And that’s just what the Tea Party wanted.

Slate.com: Republican Senator: We Can Crash Into Debt Limit “Because the Only People Buying Our Bonds Are the Federal Reserve“

They’re serious. They don’t care who they railroad. And I’ll tell you why. Because they won’t lose their money if the US economy tanks over the Debt Ceiling. Let me repeat, because this is the single most important thing to understand about the Tea Party mentality:

They don’t care.

Three words, but they mean everything and you should be terrified.

I posted this before on Facebook, but I’m repeating it here because it needs to be said and you need to share it with everyone you know.

The Tea Party’s whole goal is the destruction of the U.S. government. They are happy to toss the country over the Debt Ceiling cliff and this time the Democrats aren’t going to stop them.

Why?

Stick with me, because I’m about to go off the rails, but if you are going to fight the enemy, you have to think like them, and that is precisely what we have to do. If you do, you’ll see the whole picture.

We are looking down the barrel of a semi-automatic weapon-driven Second Civil War and if we aren’t careful, that’s exactly where we will be by the end of this month.

Don’t think for one single second that the Second Amendment is about your personal rights. Or that Obamacare is about socialism or job loss. These are threats that keep the workers in their place, going to church and praying instead of noticing what’s going on in their world. How did Lenin and Stalin rise to power? By taking out the aristocracy in a bloodbath that immediately followed World War II. In their strange, twisted world, the Tea Party (the New Confederacy) paints President Obama as the charismatic leader on an equal basis with Hitler. I’m not making this up. It’s not Godwin’s law. They’ve said it themselves, so it must be true!

The Tea Party doesn’t live in our world.

They have sold their base on the idea that We the People refers only to certain people, and is not representative of their world view. It must therefor be thrown out as a useless document.

They will toss this country over the Debt Ceiling cliff because they want to see the government change and they know they can’t do it any other way. If the US defaults, they have someone to blame because he wasn’t willing to negotiate, and that isn’t John Boehner, though he richly deserves the honor. No, they believe the Gingrich model from 1996 will work this time with President Obama, too. They don’t have a Monica Lewinsky to use as leverage this time, because Barack loves Michelle too much to mess around with someone else, so they need another something to pin on him. And the Debt Ceiling is it.

Mark my words: The motion to impeach President Obama will come on either the 17th or 18th, when he is forced by law to do something about the Debt Ceiling, and they will sing to Fox News that they’ve FINALLY got him where they want him. I hope he’s ready for that next step, because it’s a mess.

This disaster in the making is larger than the two-party system. It’s larger than Us against Them. We’re talking about more than a four-year gap in the budget process, failure to hold the banks responsible for despicable acts against our people because they set up the rules and then changed the game. We’re talking about failing to preserve our social structure in the face of domestic terrorism that strikes me as so very similar to the Weimar Republic that we should all be very, very frightened.

Ask yourself: If Godwin’s law is so very bad for conversation, why does it happen so often that people pull the subject into the discussion? We narrowly avoided electing our own charismatic leader because he lacked the charisma of the German leader I refuse to name here.

I buried these comments on a Canadian friend’s Facebook wall, under comments related to this article from The Guardian:

If America is the world’s greatest power, why the infantile politics? The US is on the brink of disaster, brought to it by a movement unique in its startling lack of realism and rigour

The second individual in the comment stream suggested I didn’t know much about American politics (apparently he assumed — incorrectly — that I was Canadian, too). As flattering as that was, I resisted the urge to thank him for the compliment and wrote this instead:

The fact is that the situation here closely parallels the development of the Nazi party in more ways than we ought to be comfortable with in this country. And the parallels are no accident, either. Wanna see something really scary?

http://gulagbound.com/39187/top-communist-compares-koch-bros-republicans-to-nazis-wants-to-make-all-of-u-s-like-california/

Note that the comparison is NOT disputed, but that those who suggest the ties are called Communists, lumped together with Democrats.

Have a little more education on the rise of the Koch brothers and their deep connections to the John Birch Society and the leap they took to control the Tea Party at the top level. (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer)

Fascism is not correct, however. You’re looking for the term Neo-fascist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-fascist

Last year I did a fairly extensive exploration of Machiavelli’s The Prince and the relationship between mid-17th Century European history and the German rise and fall in the 1940s. The Koch brothers, no doubt, have paid close attention to the way the Nazis rose to power and it shows in this current stand-off.

The American government has been more or less powerless in the last 20 years. The Kochs have exerted increasing pressure on American politics since just after Reagan was elected, which explains the Bush family’s rise to power and the Romney/Ryan ticket. They don’t want leaders. They want puppets they can control. And if they can’t control the puppets, they’ll do everything in their power to neutralize the work [we] do.

We can only hope that the electorate will remember this enormous game of Chicken come November, 2014, but I wouldn’t count on a recall election for any of these so-called representatives, and I wouldn’t imagine many of them will lose their jobs. It’s the moderate GOP who stand to lose the most when 2014 comes, and they know it.

I can hope that in another year, more voters will come to realize just how much their leaders lied to them, and do something about it in the polls.

The Kochs are making up for 150 years of failure to win the Civil War. If you can’t win one way, and replace the government the way you wanted then, there are other ways, up to and including the Tea Party, our New Confederacy. That’s precisely what the Patriot Act, Citizens United and ALEC are all about. They set the foundation for a takeover of catastrophic proportions.

And when it happens, they can finally put uppity black man back in his place, the poor can serve the RICH without educations to know they can do better, become Christian or starve to death. We don’t need government. It just takes money away from the rich who’ll take care of their own (as long as they’re rich and white).

And when Jesus comes to collect them, because the calculations were just wrong but they’ll be right soon because the Bible tells them so, the rest of the Earth won’t matter because they’re going where it’s much, much better.

And if that doesn’t happen in the near term, it’s okay because there’s always the Cayman Islands, or other off-shore locations that will welcome these guys, because they’ve got enough money invested there that they can do whatever they want, no matter what happens to the US in the process.

And if all this does come to pass, I will have to become an expat and move to Canada, because I won’t be able to live here in the US anymore.

Howl all you want about the weather, education, the environment, science, the poor, and other earthly delights like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

You are talking about people who Just. Don’t. Care. They have no reason to care. They have a better place to go.

And screw the rest of us.