In nuclear arms strategy, one winning gambit is to convince your opponents that you are an irrational and unstable player. This puts your opponents on the defensive because they can’t count on you to compute and think rationally. And so therefore in all the MAD [Mutually Assured Destruction] posturings one can never be sure that your mad opponent, as an irrational player, will be coming to the logical or expected conclusions in nuclear negotiations. Clever like a fox, Kim Jung-Il and the North Koreans have convinced the the Americans and likely the Japanese, Russians and South Koreans too that he is an irrational player with his nukes. Hence part of the reason that rogue player Kim is making mischief with irrational regularity and getting away with it like Wall Street Banksters. For example, Kim has recently completed murderous mayhem first killing 64 South Koreans sailors in a torpedo attack and then four more South Koreans killed and several wounded in shelling attacks. One just can’t wait until Iran’s President Achmadinejad gets to play this game too. So playing irrational while carrying a big stick pays
In the US, the G.O.P. is more than willing to play the Irrational Game. In fact, playing dumb and irrational as a fox fits the G.O.P.’s patriotic treasonous “starve the beast” strategy to a T. Starve the Beast says make the current government unworkable by passing tax cuts without making any offsetting expenditure cuts or increase program spending without raising the taxes to pay for it. It is the exact opposite of the pay as you – if you want to have tax cuts then commensurate spending cuts have to be made. For 8 years of the Bush regime huge tax cuts were made without corresponding expenditure cuts. Just as bad, programs like Medicaid under Bush were expanded adding billions to the deficit but without corresponding increases in taxes.
Here is how one of many economists, Bruce Bartlett, describes Starve the Beast:
In effect STB became a substitute for spending restraint among Republicans. They talked themselves into believing that cutting taxes was the only thing necessary to control the size of government. Thus, rather than being a means to an end–the end being lower spending–tax cuts became an end in themselves, completely disconnected from any meaningful effort to reduce spending or deficits.Starve the beast was a theory that seemed plausible when it was first formulated. But more than 30 years later it must be pronounced a total failure. There is not one iota of empirical evidence that it works the way it was supposed to, and there is growing evidence that its impact has been perverse–raising spending and making deficits worse. In short, STB is a completely bankrupt notion that belongs in the museum of discredited ideas, along with things like alchemy.
Republican Budget Direct under Ronald Reagan David Stockman could not be more explicit about the dangers of Starve the Beast and irrational goverment budgeting:
IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.¶ More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance
But this treasonous, Starve the Beast policy of conservative GOP thinkers like Irving Kristol has now expanded to a broader obstructionism which the G.O.P. has embraced in the past year whole heartedly. Rail against the Deficits but then hold out for the Bush Tax Cuts without making any of those tough expenditure cut decisions. Hold up critical Obama administration executive appointments with a new 60 vote majority required in the Senate to delay effective governance by the Obama administration. Be the party of NO to show that government under Democratic control can`t work. This goes well beyond the economic travesty that is Tax Cuts are sacrosanct And it is all covered by over awning idea that less government is more and government cant work effectively for you – but the G.O.P. reserves the right to govern.
When Tea party favorite, newly elected Senator Ron Paul R-Ky, says deficits and government spending are the number one problem confronting the country and then embraces extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy which increase the deficits you have the epitome of a G.O.P. irrational player. And so the partisan dance of politics on Washington continues to ever greater grotesque dysfunction because the G.O.P. continues to play irrationally – and has the major news media cowed into Fair and Balanced reporting while one, the most popular Fox News, is acting as a mouthpiece of the G.O.P.`s duplicitous and vitriolic messaging. Now that is the definition of a Foxy Irrational Player.