Lena Dunham for Congress
No offense, but all politics is passive-aggressive
By Alec MacGillis, WashPost, Published: February 22
Alec MacGillis is a senior editor at the New Republic.
President Obama and House Republicans are allowing the March 1 deadline for the budget sequester to creep nearer — as if assuming that the other guys will bear the brunt of the blame for the havoc the spending cuts will wreak. They seem a bit like the Senate Republicans, who at first declined to allow a vote on Chuck Hagel’s nomination for defense secretary, forcing a week’s delay, but then said they didn’t mean anything personal by it. Meanwhile, some governors opposed to the Affordable Care Act are simply holding back from implementing its main elements, rather than contesting it outright.
If things get any more passive-aggressive around here, we may need to bring in Lena Dunham to write the script.
For all the talk about the political parties being at each other’s throats, what we are presented with these days is something more nuanced and more frustrating: conflict that is sublimated into feints, withheld cooperation or phony goodwill rather than expressed as confrontation. It is, taken as a whole, “passive-aggressive” behavior.
That diagnosis was first applied by the military in 1945 to enlisted men who weren’t actively challenging authority enough to merit the brig but were being insubordinate in their own Bartleby-esque fashion. It’s now time to slap the tag on our political class.
(More here.)
Alec MacGillis is a senior editor at the New Republic.
President Obama and House Republicans are allowing the March 1 deadline for the budget sequester to creep nearer — as if assuming that the other guys will bear the brunt of the blame for the havoc the spending cuts will wreak. They seem a bit like the Senate Republicans, who at first declined to allow a vote on Chuck Hagel’s nomination for defense secretary, forcing a week’s delay, but then said they didn’t mean anything personal by it. Meanwhile, some governors opposed to the Affordable Care Act are simply holding back from implementing its main elements, rather than contesting it outright.
If things get any more passive-aggressive around here, we may need to bring in Lena Dunham to write the script.
For all the talk about the political parties being at each other’s throats, what we are presented with these days is something more nuanced and more frustrating: conflict that is sublimated into feints, withheld cooperation or phony goodwill rather than expressed as confrontation. It is, taken as a whole, “passive-aggressive” behavior.
That diagnosis was first applied by the military in 1945 to enlisted men who weren’t actively challenging authority enough to merit the brig but were being insubordinate in their own Bartleby-esque fashion. It’s now time to slap the tag on our political class.
(More here.)
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