Back in the 90’s, I spent a summer in Seattle working on a project with a former Boeing engineer, and I remember being astonished (and a little alarmed) when he told me about working on the 747 line. “That plane’s been in production for over twenty years, and there are still hundreds of parts that don’t fit together,” he told me, “The guys on the line know exactly where you have to re-drill a hole or just bang the thing together with a mallet.”  We were remodeling a house at the time, so I could sympathize, but with a key difference: houses don’t have to fly through the air with hundreds of passengers (and screaming babies) on board.

I’ve often wondered what on earth it is that drives people to become Republicans.  Is it personal wealth and privilege?  Sometimes, undoubtedly.  Deep-seated bigotry?  That tends to play a role as well.  Stupidity?  Yes, but that only applies to voters, not the politicians themselves.

The likeliest answer, however, isn’t grounded in such subjective, and ultimately unknowable, value systems. 

“I’m afraid that President Obama may have this ‘king complex’ sort of developing, and we’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

Thus spake Rand Paul, US Senator (!), somewhat before he knew what, exactly, Obama’s proposals would entail. But does that really matter? True believers like Paul are reliably armed with two of the three things they’ve ever half-read (not written by Ayn Rand), the Bible and the Constitution, and have come to some pretty novel conclusions about both works. Of course, such conclusions are completely nuts, but nonetheless at least as infallible as whatever comes out of the Pope’s ass on any given day, so there.

Perhaps out of a combination of peevishness and thirst, John Boehner recently blurted out, “I need this job like I need a hole in my head.”  Of course, the job he was complaining about, Speaker of the House, third in line for the Presidency, happens to be well-paid, prestigious, and quite evidently can be performed, after a fashion, even when drunk.  That is, it’s decidedly not like the jobs that the vast majority of Americans toil away at, should they be lucky enough to have a job at all. 

The brief tempest in a teapot over New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s harsh words for the House GOP in the wake of its refusal to provide disaster funding for his state has, thankfully, blown over. This sort of GOP apostasy, while pure catnip to the Village, doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the real world, and is newsworthy only because such behavior is so drearily common.

In any normal country, there would be no particular reason to expect 2013 to be an awful year. The right-wing Presidential candidate, who preached austerity, family values, and military adventurism, was soundly defeated by the center-left candidate, who favored, well, austerity-lite, personal freedom, and a fiscally convenient “peace dividend.” Overconfident and overfunded Republicans were similarly trounced in the House and Senate, losing seats in both despite stunning structural advantages.

It seemed that the Right’s perennial hobby horses, from favoring the wealthiest above all others and demonizing minorities of every type, to demanding that every non-military expenditure be slashed to the bone, had clearly been sent to the glue factory by the electorate. Alas, things are never what they seem in Washington.

Given the landscape of the Sunday morning talk shows and the obvious awkwardness of the moment, it is a bit chuckle-inducing that the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre chose, of all people, that journalistic pit bull David Gregory from the liberal NBC for his “exclusive interview,” rather than, say, Chris Wallace on Fox. Gregory, naturally, isn’t the least bit embarrassed, but instead has taken to twitter like a schoolgirl, asking hither and yon, “What should I ask him?” Too bad he doesn’t try this novel approach each week; the results could hardly be worse.

But you really have to set your drink down when LaPierre says, in advance, that he wants to focus on “mental health,” which is kind of like Saddam Hussein saying he wants to share decorating tips. No sentient being on earth would give a rat’s ass what either of these two have to say on their chosen topics except, well, David Gregory.

One of the deepest divides in our alarmingly escalating Class War is one of mutual misunderstanding between the two sides about what money is for: The Job Creators can’t comprehend why the Lower Orders should have such fripperies as food, housing, and medical care (or worse, cell phones and TV’s), while those being steadily ground into mush under their well-shod heels can’t understand why people with enough money to buy their own states don’t at least buy states where the weather is better.

It isn’t hard to conclude that Senate Republicans made colossal asses of themselves Tuesday, when they successfully (?) scuttled a UN treaty that essentially enshrines US law abroad, rather than the other way around they are always fearing. But considering their already shaky popularity with so much of America, the question is why it was so important for them to do so anyway.

If I were a Republican at this particular moment, I’d have but one wish: Better grifters, please.