The Gift That Keeps On Giving Has No Takers
This is what the Dem grassroots wanted, and this is what they got.
Fresh off his publicized declaration of hatred for Republicans and everything he claims they stand for and stereotyping African-Americans as maids and bellhops, he offered up this piece of extremist boilerplate at a fundraisier in Lawrence, KS over the weekend:
"The issue is not abortion. The issue is whether women can make up their own mind instead of some right-wing pastor, some right-wing politician telling them what to do.
"Moderate Republicans can't stand these people [conservatives], because they're intolerant. They don't think tolerance is a virtue. I'm not going to have these right-wingers throw away our right to be tolerant.
"This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good."
My, how...tolerant of him. Funny, I could swear that a black & white moral cast was one of the things about George W. Bush that drew the most lib scorn and ridicule. Is this a case of imitation of a strawman prejudice being the unwitting form of insincere flattery?
Newsmax ran the rather naive local Republican reaction:
Derrick Sontag, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, was "shocked" by Dean's comments. Said Sontag: "My immediate reaction to that whole dialogue is it's full of hatred. The Democratic Party has elected a leader that's full of hatred."
That's because the Democrat Party itself is full of hatred. And they no longer care who knows it. Indeed, they're proud of it. Kind of like Adolph Hitler preferred to see Germany utterly destroyed rather than surrender to his enemies. A veritable battle to the death.
If anything can be said for what passes for Chairman Dean's sense of discretion, he offered these rancid remarks at a function from which the press was barred (although the numbnut was still speaking into a PA system far too loud for the private home backyard that served as the venue).
Speaking of Hitler parallels, Senator "Sheets" Byrd spewed out his latest outrage right smack on the floor of the Senate before the C-SPAN cameras for the whole f'ing country to see:
Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.
But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that “Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.” And he succeeded.
Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.
And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.
Leave aside Byrd's historical illiteracy and the fact that he spent his prime years in Nazism's American cousin, the Ku Klux Klan; indeed, leave aside the mouthy old racist bastard altogether. Why haven't Senate Republicans already passed a motion of censure against him for this act of mass slander? Why do 'Pubbies keep taking this bleep? Does anybody really believe that defaming one's colleagues on the other side of the aisle as akin to the perveyors of gas ovens and concentration camps is consistent with "deliberation," "colleagiality," or "bipartisanship"? How was this man not shouted down in righteous indignation?
And then I came across this blurb this afternoon:
[A] number of Senate Republicans, including some fairly conservative ones, are already distancing themselves from the "nuclear option." Even if one believes that this option is too extreme, why would one say this on the record and forfeit the deterrent value of the option. As a group, the Republicans appear to have committed a double error - first giving the option a fearsome name and then failing to take advantage of the fear factor.
It looks like there are some Republican Senators who are more interested in looking good in print than in defending the President's right to receive a vote on well-qualified conservative judicial nominees.
Not for the first time do I wonder how the GOP has managed to retain majority control of Congress for the past decade-plus. But I don't wonder why the Donks haven't regained it - apparently, they don't need majorities in order to continue running the show on Capitol Hill, at least in the upper chamber. No less than a former Grand Wizard stands up and denounces Pachyderms as Nazis for seeking to take back the judicial confirmation process from the political terrorists who have hijacked it, and they run away. The DNC chairman slimes conservatives as "evil" and Kansas' head Elephant professes to be "shocked."
Well, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius - a Democrat that snuck into office in the midst of a GOP civil war in 2002 - seemed to be a bit cannier than Mr. Sontag, since she took great pains to be wherever King Scream wasn't.
If this burgeoning "neotimidity" of GOPers inside and outside the Beltway is any indication, maybe she didn't have anything to worry about.
Fresh off his publicized declaration of hatred for Republicans and everything he claims they stand for and stereotyping African-Americans as maids and bellhops, he offered up this piece of extremist boilerplate at a fundraisier in Lawrence, KS over the weekend:
"The issue is not abortion. The issue is whether women can make up their own mind instead of some right-wing pastor, some right-wing politician telling them what to do.
"Moderate Republicans can't stand these people [conservatives], because they're intolerant. They don't think tolerance is a virtue. I'm not going to have these right-wingers throw away our right to be tolerant.
"This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good."
My, how...tolerant of him. Funny, I could swear that a black & white moral cast was one of the things about George W. Bush that drew the most lib scorn and ridicule. Is this a case of imitation of a strawman prejudice being the unwitting form of insincere flattery?
Newsmax ran the rather naive local Republican reaction:
Derrick Sontag, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, was "shocked" by Dean's comments. Said Sontag: "My immediate reaction to that whole dialogue is it's full of hatred. The Democratic Party has elected a leader that's full of hatred."
That's because the Democrat Party itself is full of hatred. And they no longer care who knows it. Indeed, they're proud of it. Kind of like Adolph Hitler preferred to see Germany utterly destroyed rather than surrender to his enemies. A veritable battle to the death.
If anything can be said for what passes for Chairman Dean's sense of discretion, he offered these rancid remarks at a function from which the press was barred (although the numbnut was still speaking into a PA system far too loud for the private home backyard that served as the venue).
Speaking of Hitler parallels, Senator "Sheets" Byrd spewed out his latest outrage right smack on the floor of the Senate before the C-SPAN cameras for the whole f'ing country to see:
Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.
But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that “Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.” And he succeeded.
Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.
And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.
Leave aside Byrd's historical illiteracy and the fact that he spent his prime years in Nazism's American cousin, the Ku Klux Klan; indeed, leave aside the mouthy old racist bastard altogether. Why haven't Senate Republicans already passed a motion of censure against him for this act of mass slander? Why do 'Pubbies keep taking this bleep? Does anybody really believe that defaming one's colleagues on the other side of the aisle as akin to the perveyors of gas ovens and concentration camps is consistent with "deliberation," "colleagiality," or "bipartisanship"? How was this man not shouted down in righteous indignation?
And then I came across this blurb this afternoon:
[A] number of Senate Republicans, including some fairly conservative ones, are already distancing themselves from the "nuclear option." Even if one believes that this option is too extreme, why would one say this on the record and forfeit the deterrent value of the option. As a group, the Republicans appear to have committed a double error - first giving the option a fearsome name and then failing to take advantage of the fear factor.
It looks like there are some Republican Senators who are more interested in looking good in print than in defending the President's right to receive a vote on well-qualified conservative judicial nominees.
Not for the first time do I wonder how the GOP has managed to retain majority control of Congress for the past decade-plus. But I don't wonder why the Donks haven't regained it - apparently, they don't need majorities in order to continue running the show on Capitol Hill, at least in the upper chamber. No less than a former Grand Wizard stands up and denounces Pachyderms as Nazis for seeking to take back the judicial confirmation process from the political terrorists who have hijacked it, and they run away. The DNC chairman slimes conservatives as "evil" and Kansas' head Elephant professes to be "shocked."
Well, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius - a Democrat that snuck into office in the midst of a GOP civil war in 2002 - seemed to be a bit cannier than Mr. Sontag, since she took great pains to be wherever King Scream wasn't.
If this burgeoning "neotimidity" of GOPers inside and outside the Beltway is any indication, maybe she didn't have anything to worry about.
posted by JASmius at 8:35 PM
<<< Home