Inside Republican details his party's scorched earth policy.

I've tried to believe in the past, that Republicans in office were typically well-meaning, but with completely opposite ideas about how to make government work.  Then came the Tea Party folks, and the embrace of the Tea Party lunacy by Republicans.  Their crazy rants led me to believe early on, that the debt ceiling would actually stay in place and we would have to have a collapse of the economy in order to change the politics of Washington -- turns out Democrats caved in to stupid.

Now comes this piece written by Mike Lofgren, after 28 years working as a congressional staffer as a Republican.  A complete confirmation of how Republicans have taken to a scorched Earth policy, with complete disregard for the effects on American lives and livelihood.

"A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact.

About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté."

Pinch yourself.  This was a former Republican congressional staff member who wrote this, not some outside political writer or observer.

I said during the debt-ceiling debate, the only way Democrats could come out ahead, was to let Republicans fail.  It may seem to some, to be an irresponsible position to take (to let the debt ceiling stay in place), but look at what we have facing now: another debt ceiling debate in a few months, practically automatic cuts to Medicare and domestic spending, and the continuation of the lie that the debt is holding back growth.

And who is to blame?  President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Washington.  Obama's continued embrace of compromise means that the only way to resolve gridlock is to capitulate to the farthest Right.  And the Democratic leadership - specifically Senator Reid - has continued to follow lock-step with Obama's embrace of the right-of-center, instead of pushing Obama (and the nation) to follow them.  The rhetorical battle is not whether progressive policies have benefited Americans, but how rich people can best create jobs.