Posts Tagged ‘Republicans’

It really must be hard to attempt to shed the label of “The Party of No” when Republicans are preemptively filibustering Obama’s potential Supreme Court pick. And if you believe for one moment that the GOP isn’t going to fight whoever Obama picks, you haven’t been paying attention to the flailing, reactionary Republicans who are taking swipes any anything and anyone they view as Obama-like.

But these displays of childlike fury have brought some rather interesting voices forward, calling for an end to this seemingly endless partisan rancor. Joe Scarborough, for example, was seen on Morning Joe a couple of days ago, not to mention Meet the Press on Sunday, calling for what in his vernacular is referred to as being a “Reagan-like” moderate.

As much as I, too, would love an end to all of this hate, I feel it necessary to point out to Joe and anyone else who places Reagan on this pedestal that the man got to where he was by out and out destroying his political enemies. He had a fantastic and charismatic demeanor, to be sure, but make no mistake he and those who elected him were the ones who popularized the concept of political annihilation. It was a Reagan concept that you shouldn’t just beat your opponent, you should destroy, humiliate and otherwise crush them. And it was that happy-faced destroyer that has appealed to his followers in the last couple of decades. Republicans have just worn away the flowery facade and platitudes over the years to leave them as vicious pit vipers who make no bones about their loathing of anything they consider “liberal” or “Democrat”.

And now that they’ve been trounced out of office, folks like Joe hearken back to the days when they got what they wanted and everyone was sooooo happy about it. “Oh why can it not be so?” Put simply because your party, which when it was in power, had zero calls for an end to partisan games. To this day you all still delight to tune in to Rush Limbaugh so he can say what it is you all feel in the darkest part of your hearts that you’d dare not say out loud. Well guess what? You wanted an opposition and you now have one. You’ve been beaten soundly by it. And it’s not Democrats who beat you but Americans who’ve simply had enough of you for a while.

And that’s the mistake/fortune that both parties end up making.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher who is famous for one quote, which is too often used out of context and stripped of its original meaning. “Hell is other people.” By itself it appears to be nothing more than a cynic’s view of the modern world. But the meaning is, in fact, much deeper.

The quote should really capitalize the “O” in other because it means anyone different than you. The mere existence of this Other proves your own existence. Without the Other, you are nothing. And so it is with Democrats and Republicans. They are absolutely dependent on one another.

The problem with this is that the pendulum swings both ways. And unlike Einstein’s theories in physics, there is no equal and opposite reaction when it comes to political paybacks. It’s all about perception. Clinton’s impeachment was, in the eyes of the majority of the Republican Party faithful, payback for what happened to Nixon. The fact that Nixon brought it on himself doesn’t matter. The Others were responsible.

Also during Joe’s apparent calls for a party-wide mia culpa was the notion that Democrats were “saying an awful lot of untrue things about Bush”. I would find that laughable if it didn’t make me to fucking angry.

While I will grant that an awful lot of bad things were said about Bush, very little of the vitriol was unwarranted. He let commercial aircraft crash into the buildings of two major cities and, if that wasn’t enough, let another one drown for a few days after a hurricane. He is responsible for launching an illegal war against a country that he blamed wrongly for the aforementioned plane attacks while virtually ignoring the ultimate mastermind of the plot. All during that time he broke the law by illegally wiretapping US citizens, torturing human beings against not only our own laws but the treaties we as a country have signed, and outing a CIA agent because she was married to a guy who embarrassed his judgment in an editorial. I don’t think I’m being unfair. I think it’s unfair that he’s allowed to be freer than the record number of criminal executions he presided over as Governor of Texas.

Of course I could be falling victim to my own Others. But I don’t think it’s wrong to expect those who are elected to hold up the law to adhere to it themselves.

A fascinating act has been taking place before our very eyes and I think it deserves recognition. Perhaps a special Oscar category could be made. There is simply no more fitting way to describe what the conservatives in congress and in the media are doing. Take this for example, courtesy of Media Matters:

Now to the untrained eye, which is roughly 95% of the Fox & Friends viewership, it may look like Laura Ingram, Steve Doochey and Brian Kilmeade have an actual point. In short, Democrats are overstating the dangers of this economy so that any turn in the other direction can be sighted as progress. And apparently creating only 2 million jobs would be total and utter failure in Doochey’s assessment, hence his permanent name change on this site.

But to folks who’ve been watching both sides of their mouths for the last decade or so, something more interesting and truly funny is starting to show: They know this stimulus is going to work and they’re preemptively trying to call it a miserable failure even if it does succeed on some minor level. Watch that segment again and tell me it’s not fall-on-the-floor hilarious. They fear any measurable success in the stimulus package. Why? Because they disowned it. Any success is yet another disgrace to their failed economic vision. And any failure will be amplified by their right-wing echo chamber.

The funniest example of a right-winger totally owning up to the fact that this bill will have a measure of success is none other than Karl Rove himself (hat tip to Raw Story).

I also find it humorous that they call it using “fear tactics” and “doom and gloom” on the American people. They should be experts on this subject because it’s all they’ve resorted to when it came to terrorism and it’s how we ended up in Iraq in the first place. And since we’re drawing parallels to the Iraq War, I think there was a bit of spending involved in that one. The last I checked there was.

In fact, if I recall correctly, the previous administration managed to give out no-bid contracts to the companies they used to work for and, at the same time, manage to literally lose billions of those dollars into thin air. Boy I wish that billions of dollars could somehow go missing in our own country.

The fact is that Republicans have lost a considerable amount of face over the past years because of disastrous decisions and horrible management. The result is that the last two elections have seen Republicans being shown the door for being such awful stewards of our government. So now they’ve returned to the stone-throwing partisanship and hoping for another chance to fool the electorate into another “Contract With America” that they can screw us with.

Honestly, I don’t think Americans have too much difficulty in seeing these statements for what they really are: The last cries of a dying ideology that brought about the greatest economic disaster since The Great Depression. I expect they’d be bitter for owning that dubious reputation once more since their party was responsible for that one, too. But what they need to accept is their ideas have failed, the American people voted for change and that’s exactly what’s happening.

PS: Can someone tell Lindsey Graham to stop using a smarmy rendition of “that’s not a change we can believe in” as if the campaign is still on? Fuck, he’s an embarrassment.

If the GOP has planned this Sarah “The Great Imbecile” Palin personna so that all she has to do is meet the very lowest of expectations in tonight’s debate, I’ve really got to hand it to them. They truly are the masters of political and public manipulation. As much as I personally groaned when Obama selected “Gaffe-Master” Biden, I had never dreamed even his mastery of munching his own metatarsals wouldn’t hold a candle to Palin.

To those that are familiar with following politics, you know what to expect during certain periods of the game; In the run-up to a debate, both candidates will display uncharacteristic self-deprecation, an “aw schucks, I’m just a regular person” public face, and at the same time mention their opponent as a worthy adversary. Biden pulled this off with such grace that it barely made news. He at one point even went as far as to say that perhaps Obama would’ve been better served by Hillary Clinton as his running mate. This is, of course, pure bullshit. Biden knows it. Every last pundit on the networks knows it. But it’s part of the game — you can practically set your watch by it.

The McCain campaign, or more precisely Sarah Palin, seems to have gone a bit overboard with the self-deprecation part. She’s had three major interviews. One of them with Faux News entertainment show host Sean Hannity, which barely counted as an interview so much as it was Sean walking her through the dangerous world of what to expect to hear from the other side. The other two were with ABC’s Charlie Gibson and CBS’ Katie Couric. I have little respect for either of these two. Gibson seems to caught up in making sure that both the left and right are criticized evenly in news time without much regard for equity or fairness, and Couric is quite possibly the weakest personality ever to sit at the anchor’s desk. But even under those circumstances, Palin’s interviews are a cornucopia of misstatements, outright lies and coffee-spitting stupid reactions. When Saturday Night Live lampooned her Couric interview, it was almost sad to realize that the real interview was actually much more funny. And let’s face it: If Couric looked like a good interviewer, what’s that say about her subject?

Like I said, if this was all planned to place Plain as the clear underdog going into the debate so that by simply showing up she’s exceeded everyone’s expectations, then bravo GOP! but judging by John McCain’s thinly veiled anger during several interviews recently, I’m beginning to think that they’re not the masterminds I’m alluding to.

The response from the media over this long series of “can you believe how stupid she is” moments was to try to simplify the questions. “Maybe we’re being too hard on her,” thought the media. But when asked what newspapers she gets her news from — a question that all can agree is fairly innocuous — she answered with the same words and tone of some disinterested blind speeddate, “Oh, all of them,” eager to move on to another subject that was less confusing to her folksy mind.

Now when it became clear that Sarah Palin isn’t qualified to run a Starbuck’s, much less the White House, in much of the public’s mind, the GOP went into attack mode. And to make my point much more succinctly, I’ll use the brainless walking right-wing talking point Elisabeth Hasselbeck as an example. You know her: She’s the one who ran crying to Fox News when that bad ol’ Rosie O’Donnell called her out on The View for being a backstabbing blowhard bitch. (They coddled her and made the boo boo go away, I assure you.)

Elisabeth has decided to take on the indefensible position of Palin Defender. Aside from the fact that many of the long-standing conservative windbags have now officially dismissed Palin as a complete failure of a pick for the VP slot, Hasselbeck stood proud in her vapid ignorance today. When challenged by Barbara Walters, “Tell us now why you think that Sarah Palin would make a very good President,” she answered the way you’d expect: “Tell me why Barack Obama is qualified to be President.” In answering the way she did, it’s clear that is the best argument she can level against Obama, and in doing so makes her defense of Palin’s lack of experience that much more untenable.

But that’s what I’ve come to expect from these dead-ender conservatives. To them this financial crisis, though mental gymnastics that not even our Gold Medal Olympians could perform, is the fault of Bill Clinton. The more astute among them claim “everyone’s at fault”, not willing to come to terms with the fact that the so-called “trickle-down economics” they touted and deregulated for so long is a $700 billion bucket of bullshit.

But the bottom line tonight is that Palin with stand at one podium tonight and Biden will stand at the other. There will be a lot of points thrown back and forth, and I expect a zinger or two to come out of both of them that will make their regular rounds on the news networks where they’ll be dissected into minutia and played ad nauseum. And the net affect on the polls will be nothing.

As a country we are now completely focused on the economy. I dare say there’s more than a few folks out there who are genuinely unaware that Osama bin Laden still exists. The terrorism trump card has been overplayed and now folks are more concerned about the things Democrats have been warning about for years — and now the people are finally listening as their stock portfolios and retirement funds got torpedoed. Obama is getting clear majorities in the polls and McCain’s even losing ground in Virginia and perennially Republican Texas.

I’d like to think that this success is coming from the concept of genuinely fresh ideas that Obama brings to the table, but that would be naive to say the least. But a man can hope, can’t he?

Look, Republicans, she’s just not a good pick. She’s a disaster. She’s a lampoon of everything that everyone hates about politics. That’s not so much a Democrat saying it — though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take devious pleasure from watching her self destruct any time she’s actually questioned on the issues — but it’s pretty much the only observation that any intellectually honest person can make when they see her. While I can grant that her speech at the RNC brought the house down, that’s what a good public speaker does. What’s becoming more and more evident is when she’s asked for information that she hasn’t been drastically coached with the latest and greatest Republican talking points, she looks like a total idiot.

Admit it. She does. For the love of all that is good and holy, be honest with yourself for once in your damned lives already! Failing that, watch Jack Cafferty rip the very idea that this woman is in line to be VP to absolute shreds.

I’ve been holding off on writing about it because every person who has ever set foot in Minnesota in the last century is pretty much summing up the feelings that most of us are going though. It can be summed up thusly: “I’ve driven over that bridge a thousand times!” And though I admittedly avoid traveling to Minneapolis, the same can be said for me, especially during my band days. It’s 9 miles by highway from me.

After it happened, save for my quick 15-minute evaluation that the local media was going to run shock and awe video for the duration of the next dozen news cycles, I shut myself off from the events. It was mostly out of concern for my children who heard within minutes of the kids being evacuated from the bus and were already a bit shaken by the news. But when I made Patton leave to watch the coverage elsewhere and changed the channel, I felt considerably better for my blindness. I was already aware at that point that my family was all safe and, as far as I knew, my friends were as well. And I wasn’t trying to think about possibilities. It wasn’t until the next morning that I learned differently.

On my forum, which isn’t used that much, my dear friend Justin posted a quick thread:

Thought I’d let you know that I’m ok. I wont be in to work for a while to chat via email. I was at the very north end of the bridge when it collapsed. I compressed a disc in my back when my car fell. No surgery so far; just meds and rehab.

Justin

That’s when reality came crashing in. And since then I’ve been in two modes: My friend is still alive but from the sounds of it just barely, and really goddamned angry at people too cheap to pay for roads. The latter half of that has been toned down considerably. Tim “Two-Vetos” Pawlenty is not on my favorites list right now along with anyone who’s too cheap to have their precious tax refunds taken away from them in the name of the public good. But let’s cover the details of my friend first.

Images are said to speak a thousand words, but I had a difficult time trying to find the right angle of where he may have been. But I found a photo at StarTribune.com and he just confirmed that it’s where he was.

Click for larger image:

Justin and I have been friends now for about 15 years. We were in a band together and I maintain that I will never be able to play with another bassist as long as I live because we were so in tune with one another. We’ve crossed that bridge many times going to this club or that bar together. To think that he was mere seconds ahead of plummeting a good deal further than the fall that injured his back and more than likely being one of the fatalities is beyond my comprehension. I’m sure a good portion of his friends and family have realized the same thing and are coping with it in their own ways.

My coping mechanism of choice right now is anger. But before I rant I’d like to make it clear that I am not speaking for Justin, nor anyone else who knows him.

Matt from MNPublius posted a thoughtful and well-reasoned post yesterday asking people to let the investigation happen before succumbing to partisan finger-pointing. His rival, the moronic Brodkorb from MDE had spent most of the day finding posts and quotes of angry people who were rightfully aiming their ire at Republicans. Not that they were wrong, mind you, but because they dared say “I told you so” in the face of a horrible tragedy due to Republican ineptitude.

Nick Coleman’s article raised quite a few eyebrows and even a few tempers, but the fact is that he was dead on in his evaluation.

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It’s been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase – the first in 20 years – last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

I’m not just pointing fingers at Pawlenty. The outrage here is not partisan. It is general.

But let’s follow the advice of Matt from MNPublius for a moment here and take a step back. Because it would be easy to point out that the governor lied in his remarks during the press conference when he stated that inspections in 2005 and 2006 had found no structural problems with the bridge. Even after it was already clear by several news reports that the bridge was indeed a candidate for outright replacement.

Thankfully there are clear-minded experts on these matters — you know, the people that Republicans hate hearing from because of the experts inability to see things through the GOP lense — who have been carefully pointing out to us that this is by no means the one bad apple in the bunch.

The fact is that Americans have been squandering the infrastructure legacy bequeathed to us by earlier generations. Like the spoiled offspring of well-off parents, we behave as though we have no idea what is required to sustain the quality of our daily lives. Our electricity comes to us via a decades-old system of power generators, transformers and transmission lines—a system that has utility executives holding their collective breath on every hot day in July and August. We once had a transportation system that was the envy of the world. Now we are better known for our congested highways, second-rate ports, third-rate passenger trains and a primitive air traffic control system. Many of the great public works projects of the 20th century—dams and canal locks, bridges and tunnels, aquifers and aqueducts, and even the Eisenhower interstate highway system—are at or beyond their designed life span.

In the end, investigators may find that there are unique and extraordinary reasons why the I-35W bridge failed. But the graphic images of buckled pavement, stranded vehicles, twisted girders and heroic rescuers are a reminder that infrastructure cannot be taken for granted. The blind eye that taxpayers and our elected officials have been turning to the imperative of maintaining and upgrading the critical foundations that underpin our lives is irrational and reckless.

So it is true to say that had Tim Pawlenty sucked it up and taken a tax hike for the team instead of a couple vetoes that the bridge would’ve probably fallen anyway. But his strings are being carefully pulled by people who are much more affected by tax increases and put together bullshit organizations like the Minnesota Taxpayer’s League who get their collective panties in a bunch when they money they’ve earned in the American society is taxed to take care of it. So yes I’m angry. And yes, Brodkorb, I’m pointing fingers, too. I feel as though I’m entitled to. I nearly lost my friend because you don’t want to pay your fucking taxes. That’s what it breaks down to.