Revenge is Mine Saith the Republicans

I look at the general state of things in Washington DC and am reminded of someone I worked with many years ago.

Let’s call him Max. It isn’t his real name, but it’ll do. Max held grudges like no-one else I’ve known, at least personally. He lived by a very particular code. If he didn’t like you or felt that you had slighted him in any way, large or small or non-existent, he did everything possible short of violence to get you.

It didn’t matter who might get caught in the crosshairs. Other people, the job, client work, the company, they were all considered expendable so that Max could get his revenge.

You could be working with this guy for years and have a decent, even friendly, business relationship. Then, one day, you might point out an error in his work. It was probably something minor, but needed to be corrected before going to the client. Didn’t matter. The perceived criticism was all it took.

Max would spend every spare moment, and some moments that should have been devoted to client work, to destroy you in the office. We were a small office, not more than a hundred people, so it was a fairly obvious and disturbing process.

The campaign would start off subtly, a hint here, a remark there. Max would criticize your work, belittle you personally while your back was turned and make unflattering comments to co-workers as you passed in the hallway. If satisfying results did not come fast enough, Max would escalate his campaign until the target quit, begged forgiveness (without really knowing what they’d done wrong) or were reassigned.

It didn’t matter to him who or what he damaged along the way. If the client was lost, no problem. If other staff left the company because of the toxic environment, who cares? The only thing that counted was that Max felt he achieved his goal of destroying his “enemy”.

This was allowed to go on for years before the local CEO had enough and asked him to leave. By then, we’d lost clients and good staff. The damage had truly been done.

To my point…I look at the scorched Earth politics being conducted by the Republicans in Washington DC and wonder when it will end. Does it need for the country to grind to a four year long standstill before they are happy? We are already pretty much there because the Democrats still can’t find the spine and will to do their jobs on their own. So, another three years of deepening debt, more unemployment, higher healthcare costs, poorer education, losing ground in technology, worsening pollution, and so on?

The Republicans are insulted because they lost the elections in 2008.  They are angry that the people of this country said enough.  They feel like their policies were criticized and thought of as failures.  They want revenge.  They want revenge at all costs.

Will they finally be happy when the United States becomes a third world nation?