Just a quick post today, since I can’t help noting that a front-page article in todays New York Times recalls points that I made earlier this week.

The article relates how various business organizations in the US—including such traditionally right-wing stalwarts as the Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business—are upset at the crazy behavior of the Congressional Republicans but have found themselves largely unable to do much about it.  Now, some of the business groups are actually considering taking sides in Republican primary elections against the most reckless radicals.   This comports with my observation, following Mark Mizruchi, that most of the US business class has in effect ceded control of the Republican Party to extremists who are happy to give business most of what it wants, but who go further than it would like.

I also have to remark on the Times article’s reference to the Republican extremists as the “conservative wing” of the party.   That absurdly implies that most of the party is somewhere to the left of conservative.   Are Boehner and Cantor moderates?   In my view, it would be more accurate to refer to the left wing of the party as conservative; the majority is out and out reactionary.  (As I showed yesterday, true moderates are an insignificant minority.)  Among the reactionary majority of Congressional Republicans, a considerable number are true fanatics—those are the Times’s “conservative wing.”  As I have pointed out before, “objective” journalism has a problem in characterizing Republican extremism, so we get such circumlocutions as the “conservative wing.”

Dwight Eisenhower was known to refer privately to the “reactionary wing” of his party.  What would Ike think of today’s GOP?  That reactionary wing is now practically the whole bird.

My blogging will be light for the next 10 days—on vacation in Italy!  But I will take my laptop, so we’ll see.