The award winning 1957 movie, "The Bridge Over the River Kwai", tells the WWII story of captured British soldiers forced to build a bridge in Burma that would aid the Japanese war effort. After refusing to cooperate, eventually the lead character played brilliantly by Alec Guinness decides that his pride as a British officer and engineer dictated that they do an outstanding job as a testimony to British expertise. At the end of the movie, he comes out of his trance as a captured and coerced man and manages to blow up the bridge at the last moment.
I think the Republican tax plan is similar to this. The Republican Congress is passing a tax plan that has been coerced from them by tyrannical plutocratic donors and a tyrannical president. They are in some kind of trance under the spell of tyrants and have built and are passing a tax plan that is essentially an abomination - not just to liberals but to decades of conservative thinking that has laid out numerous approaches to tax reform - almost none of which are in this plan.
Is there a chance that a Republican Senator can, like Alec Guinness in the movie, suddenly come to and throw themselves on the "plunger of the detonator" and blow up this disastrous legislation?
Probably not. That would take courage and honor.
