"The Republican Party IS the News"
Robert Novak - aka "the prince of darkness" (all lower case, I assure you) - is back beating the drums of pessimism once again, this time over the President's disastrous prescription drug entitlement and how it is the political anchor that will inexorably pull the GOP to the bottom. As opposed to everybody else, it seems, who, wittingly or unwittingly, are apeing Dr. Demented's Bart Simpsonesque blitherings about the Abramoff dust-up being a "100% Republican scandal" that will deliver both houses of Congress to his party, super-sized and with a nice side salad to boot, without Donks even having to campaign, or run ads, or interrupt their tequila comas. Just look conscious, stay vertical, and and avoid puking on their Guccis and they'll be home, or so the thinking seems to go.
Now some of our readers may not believe this, but I have a tendency to grow politically overconfident. Particularly in-between campaigns when there are no meaningful polling figures to quantify the true state of the political landscape. I really had it bad after the 1994 GOP wipeout, and accordingly looked really bad after Bill Clinton, whose politcal obituary I had spent the previous two years serially proclaiming, won re-election in 1996. Heck, it was a relapse, really, judging from how I wrote that Sick Willie was on a "bullet train to oblivion" in his first go-around - when he was thirty points ahead of Bush41.
After 1996 I vowed never to let my objectivity as an amatuer political analyst (aka blogger) grow so embarrassingly compromised ever again. I've done a fairly decent job in that regard (if I do say so myself) and don't want to sag back into oblivious complacency now. And, indeed, I have taken a good faith stab at pointing out the GOP's true vulnerabilities and how they could cause the only problem that could bring their majorities into serious jeopardy: demoralize or antagonize the base and depress turnout next November.
And yet I look across the aisle at an opposition that has prominent senators and representatives gibbering slaveringly about impeaching the President and pre-emptively filibustering his Supreme Court nominee, and celebrity grass-rootsers (pun intended) leading pilgrimmages to Venezuela for audiences with Hugo Chavez, the new pope of Bolshevism. I'd lay even money that Harry Belefonte's tongue is still wedged up Chavez's ass, quivering in ecstasy. I look at that woebegone bunch of loser has-been extremist turncoats and their lack of any unified, much less unifying, message, and the absence of any compelling national figure(s) to at least distract the public from that yawning substantive emptiness and I just cannot fathom a set of circumstances under which a majority of voters turn the country back over to such people. It's like wiping before you poop, it just makes no sense (h/t Larry The Cable Guy).
You know who else says so? The noted right-wing extremist Joe Klein, in Time magazine:
And they just can't bring themselves to do that. Because it goes against everything they believe in, and because it would put them on the same side as George W. Bush, which would, in their minds, be like an evangelical bowing down to an inflatable image of Anton LeVey.
Consequently, the Democrats remain in the minority with every expectation, and not a chance in hell (heh), of escaping it, convincing each other that victory is inevitable and therefore never seeing the next defeat coming, after which the howls of "Republican election theft" begin the next Sisyphian cycle anew. Or, to cite AmSpecBlog's newest contributor, John Batchelor:
Now some of our readers may not believe this, but I have a tendency to grow politically overconfident. Particularly in-between campaigns when there are no meaningful polling figures to quantify the true state of the political landscape. I really had it bad after the 1994 GOP wipeout, and accordingly looked really bad after Bill Clinton, whose politcal obituary I had spent the previous two years serially proclaiming, won re-election in 1996. Heck, it was a relapse, really, judging from how I wrote that Sick Willie was on a "bullet train to oblivion" in his first go-around - when he was thirty points ahead of Bush41.
After 1996 I vowed never to let my objectivity as an amatuer political analyst (aka blogger) grow so embarrassingly compromised ever again. I've done a fairly decent job in that regard (if I do say so myself) and don't want to sag back into oblivious complacency now. And, indeed, I have taken a good faith stab at pointing out the GOP's true vulnerabilities and how they could cause the only problem that could bring their majorities into serious jeopardy: demoralize or antagonize the base and depress turnout next November.
And yet I look across the aisle at an opposition that has prominent senators and representatives gibbering slaveringly about impeaching the President and pre-emptively filibustering his Supreme Court nominee, and celebrity grass-rootsers (pun intended) leading pilgrimmages to Venezuela for audiences with Hugo Chavez, the new pope of Bolshevism. I'd lay even money that Harry Belefonte's tongue is still wedged up Chavez's ass, quivering in ecstasy. I look at that woebegone bunch of loser has-been extremist turncoats and their lack of any unified, much less unifying, message, and the absence of any compelling national figure(s) to at least distract the public from that yawning substantive emptiness and I just cannot fathom a set of circumstances under which a majority of voters turn the country back over to such people. It's like wiping before you poop, it just makes no sense (h/t Larry The Cable Guy).
You know who else says so? The noted right-wing extremist Joe Klein, in Time magazine:
[T]he Democrats are on thin ice [on national security]. Some of the wilder donkeys talked about a possible Bush impeachment after the NSA program was revealed.
The latest version of the absolutely necessary Patriot Act, which updates the laws regulating the war on terrorism and contains civil-liberties improvements over the first edition, was nearly killed by a stampede of Senate Democrats. Most polls indicate that a strong majority of Americans favor the act, and I suspect that a strong majority would favor the NSA program as well, if its details were declassified and made known.
In fact, liberal Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on these issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo's family in the right-to-die case last year [poor analogy on Klein's part, but it's his point that matters].
But there is a difference. National security is a far more important issue, and until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country. [emphasis added]
And they just can't bring themselves to do that. Because it goes against everything they believe in, and because it would put them on the same side as George W. Bush, which would, in their minds, be like an evangelical bowing down to an inflatable image of Anton LeVey.
Consequently, the Democrats remain in the minority with every expectation, and not a chance in hell (heh), of escaping it, convincing each other that victory is inevitable and therefore never seeing the next defeat coming, after which the howls of "Republican election theft" begin the next Sisyphian cycle anew. Or, to cite AmSpecBlog's newest contributor, John Batchelor:
Where are the Democrats? In the same bottle-fed, undemanding, ceremonial position the Republicans endured during the long struggle against fascism in FDR’s years: coat-holders, hostesses, ushers, protesters, whiners, commentators and my favorite, voices of conscience.When they're playing the Washington Generals every night, how good do the Harlem Globetrotters really have to be?
posted by JASmius at 9:43 PM
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