Rep. Pete Sessions, head of the House Republican committee tasked with electing more GOP members, has a unique theory as to why unemployment continues to rise: Obama wants to wipe out capitalism.
Deep into a New York Times item Monday about rising jobless numbers comes a theory that the Times gently refers to as an "argument" that "may indeed face an uphill fight."
Sessions told the Times that Obama's plan is to "diminish employment and diminish stock prices." By doing so, Obama "intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it" as part of a "divide and conquer" strategy to consolidate power.
The Times then follows with another understated gem: "Polls offer little evidence that Americans are prepared to accept those arguments."
So is Obama part of some communist sleeper cell intent on destroying America? For Sessions, it's nothing new to think of politics in terrorist terms -- only in the past Sessions has argued that the Republican Party ought to emulate terrorists, not that Obama already does.
The GOP, Sessions famously argued in February, ought to model its "insurgency" after the Taliban. "Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban," he said.
"And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes. And these Taliban -- I'm not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that's not what we're saying. I'm saying an example of how you go about is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with."
Asked to clarify if he was indeed suggesting House Republicans model themselves after the Taliban, he said: "I simply said one can see that there's a model out there for insurgency."
A Sessions spokesman didn't immediately return a call. An NRCC spokesman stood by the remark:
"The Chairman was simply reiterating what many members of the Democratic Party have echoed over the past several weeks, which is that one-party dominance in Washington has further damaged our economy and undercut our country's free enterprise system."
Ryan Grim is the author of the forthcoming book This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America