How To Paint The Republican Party Into A Corner In 30 Days

Step One: Buy a truckload of 55 gallon drums of red, white and blue paint from a “job creator/big-time political donor” who has several manufacturing plants located in China.

Step Two: Have these 55 gallon drums delivered to a corner in a government office building – any large, drafty, marble covered rotunda with the words “U.S. House of Representatives” carved into the lintel over its grand entryway will do.

Step Three: Ignore all of your core constituents except the fringe radicals that have hijacked your party, the ones who want to shut down the government, so long as it doesn’t interfere with their Medicare or Social Security.  Tell the media that the last nineteen times you voted to increase the debt ceiling without a whimper was because you needed “to get Bin Laden.”

Step Four: Paste lowbrow political slogans – “Don’t Retreat, Reload!”, “Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death!”, “I pledge allegiance to the Job Creators of America and to the Republicans which they own…” – artfully in front of said corner you plan to paint yourself into so that the TV news crews who interview you will always have one of these slogans over your left shoulder to focus on.

Step Five:Avoid coordinating any of your negotiating techniques with the Speaker of the House, and repeatedly insist “how difficult it is for fiscal conservatives to vote for a debt-ceiling increase”, a line all political reporters on the job more than two weeks know to be false, but will print anyway    

Step Six: Take the responses of talk radio audiences as a proxy for the rest of America and throw your latest polling results in the trash.

Step Seven: Begin the answer to every reporter’s question with “We will not…”, “We refuse to…”

Step Eight: Take metaphorical hatchets to the core principle of political compromise and real hatchets to the 55 gallon drums full of paint while hollering “I want my offsetting tax cuts when I want them!” because the president has the gall to propose 17 percent tax increases to go along with the 83 percent of spending cuts in his Grand Bargain, a mix your own economists at right wing think tanks have declared actually work in “countries with successful fiscal consolidation plans”.

Step Nine: Watch sickly pink and bluish paint gush out of the gashes in the 55 gallon drums into a thick pool of sickly pink and bluish latex paint that immediately sends every rational American on the other side of the wet paint you’ve spilled on purpose to look for high ground. Their host on the high ground, as they and the rest of the country watch your self-inflicted paint spill start to lap at your shoes, turns out to be none other than that most reasonable man in the room, the same man whose presidency you have been hoping to paint over, President Barack Obama. 

Step Ten: Start hollering “this is all that job killing President Obama’s fault” as the advancing paint and the shrinking corner force you and your political colleagues into unnaturally close proximity. The only good thing about this newfound intimacy? It will allow some of you to gather the courage needed to take those gut curdling procedural votes on “Cut, Cap, and Balance”, votes that will mean absolutely nothing at the end of the day.

It will turn out to be the closest your party has been in months.