LET THEM EAT WEDGE ISSUES!

Well, this is perfect:

Instead Of Extending Tax Cut For 160 Million Americans, House Commissioned Bust Of Winston Churchill

While House Republicans couldn't get their act together to approve an extension of the payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits last night, they were able to do something far more frivolousness -- commission a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to be placed in the Capitol. The House "adjourned moments after" passing the bill...

The resolution was seen as a rebuke to the White House, which returned a bust of Churchill to the British Embassy in 2009....

Of course, this isn't just a "rebuke" -- it's an indirect way of telling swing voters that Obama opposes foreign policy muscularity and is anti-Western in general; it's also a way of delighting the right-wing base with a bit of Birtherism Lite, because, as we recall, right-wing bloviators -- Mike Huckabee, Glenn Beck, Stuart Varney -- have said that Obama returned the bust (replacing it with -- horrors! -- a bust of Lincoln) because he's Kenyan:

HUCKABEE: The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

... [Glenn] Beck even went so far as to suggest that the anti-British anger Obama apparently carries in his genes is cause to question whether he can effectively serve as president: "I'm trying to understand what he is doing. Has he dealt with that with his grandfather? How has he dealt with that? Someone in the press needs to ask him these questions. Can he be an honest broker at the table with the nations who are our traditional biggest allies?"

...VARNEY: ... I've not read the formal statement, but an explanation was requested and that was the explanation was that President Obama's father, being a native Kenyan, disliked the British colonial rule in Kenya that ended in 1963.

If (as I expect, current GOP chaos notwithstanding) we have a President Romney and GOP majorities in both houses of Congress in 2013, this is how everything is going to go, in between major efforts to repeal the twentieth century. Romney and congressional leaders will work on repealing the health care law, passing a deficit-exploding series of tax cuts that includes massive tax breaks for the rich, locking in a supermajority requirement in both houses to ever raise taxes again, busting federal public-sector unions, and passing a national right-to-work law, a national voter ID law, and national concealed-carry reciprocity -- but apart from that, the GOP government will devote itself almost exclusively to wedge-issue votes: on Planned Parenthood, on public broadcasting, on prayer in public places, on the remnants of ACORN, on mosque construction, on whatever the right-media can gin up. If the Scott Walker-esque legislative blitzkrieg can happen quickly enough, we could have one year of dismantling the twentieth century and three years of wedge, wedge, wedge. We can only hope that that's when the public will say "Enough."