Partisanship and Vacations

Partisanship as Cosmetic Surgery

You have to hand it to the Republican party. They have found a can’t-lose approach to our current economic crisis.

Case 1: The economy recovers. The Republicans, only three of whom voted for the stimulus package, will say that markets are “self-healing”. The economy has rebounded in spite of the stimulus package. The natural ups and downs of the market have manifested themselves. Boy are we lucky the stimulus package didn’t do more harm!

Case 2: The economy continues to sink. Ah, we said it wouldn’t work! You see, that stimulus package has made matters worse. It’s 2010 folks, vote for lots of Republicans!

Do you need proof of their strategy? Look at Karl Rove’s warning to his party in the Wall Street Journal:

But if Republicans predict economic doom, they will overplay their hand. The Democratic stimulus will slow recovery, but not stop it. Recessions don’t last forever and, if history is a guide, sometime late this year or early next the economy will rebound on its own. When that happens, Democrats will argue that their untargeted, permanent spending actually revived the economy.

via Karl Rove Says Barack Obama’s Stimulus Package Will Cost Him Fiscally and Politically – WSJ.com.

The emphasis in the above quote was added by me. Of course Rove here accuses the Democrats of doing the inverse of what the Republican plan is. The Democrats will take credit for an inevitable upturn to which they have made no real contribution.

Am I the only one who sees an incredible smugness and cynicism to this line of thinking? First, it confounds me how Republicans can advocate doing next to nothing while the markets self correct. How many people have to lose their jobs and their homes while we wait for this economic theory to materialize? The cynicism comes from this idea of unanimously opposing the President’s initiatives so if they don’t work, the GOP will look like geniuses who were ignored.

While I may not like the idea, partisanship is probably the best play the Republicans can make in this government ruled by contention. In six of the last eight years, they betrayed their creed, they spent us into the ground (partly on a war we shouldn’t have been fighting) and now they have their chance to be self righteous. In the words of Rove, “Over the past month, House Republicans have used the stimulus bill to redefine their party”. Doesn’t it comfort you that our nation’s dismal state provides the Republican party with an opportunity for a makeover? They can focus on their image while the rest of us struggle.

Hurry Up, I’m Late for My Plane!

Democrats are no saints in this mess either. Today on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”, Boston based columnist Mike Barnacle expressed understandable outrage at one of the motivating factors for the rush to sign the stimulus bill. Joe Scarborough agreed with him and so did I. You see, it’s vacation time for Congress right now. Our representatives had a choice to cancel their planned vacations and read the bill more carefully and perhaps negotiate it to a better standard or they could go ski in the Rockies. They chose the latter.

According to a pundit I watched on TV last week, this mindset is not at all unusual and it is exclusive to no party affiliation. You don’t get in the way of Congress and their vacation. So when you watch congressional hearings where the various representatives rake bankers and corporate big wigs over the coals for “not getting it”, you’re actually witnessing the pot calling the kettle black.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Are You a Rebel When You Buck Idiots?

One of the John McCain campaign’s new salient points is that unlike John McCain who has often bucked his own party, Obama has never gone against the party line. The logic here escapes me. Since I am a firm believer that everything we need to know we learned in kindergarten, let’s go into a typical kindergarten class to see the nonsense behind this line of reasoning.

Barry is a nice kid. He hangs with a nice crowd. All of Barry’s friends are smart, well behaved and generous toward others.

Johnny is also a nice kid but he hangs with a bad crowd. Johnny’s friends are rude, dumb, ignorant of those less fortunate than they. Johnny could ditch them but he sticks around and tries to change them.

What adult in their right mind would say to Barry, “Barry, you need to be more like Johnny. You need to stop putting up with the good behavior of your crowd. Start bucking them Barry. Start acting like a spoiled, dumb ignorant brat. Johnny’s a rebel! Why can’t you be one too?”

And that, my friends (as McCain would say) is our situation here. If for the sake of argument we say that McCain does have a history of bucking his party, well good for him, cos for the past eight years at least, his party has been a bunch of idiots. There’s a reason why Obama hasn’t bucked his party … his party is RIGHT on most of the important issues of our time! If he bucked them, he’d be an idiot!

The blogging yin to my yang, The Rigorist, has often called McCain a RINO (Republican in Name Only). If this is true, it hardly makes McCain a rebel. It makes him smart enough to have some good ideas but not smart enough to stop hanging with the bad crowd.

Of course, what makes the entire argument moot is that McCain traded in his rebel status the minute he decided that he wanted to be President in 2009. Now he has no principles and no scruples. He’s just another one of the idiots.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Age Before Beauty

From the desk of The Rigorist

When competing teams first meet there is the handshake to establish the common ground of sportsmanship. When the salesmen of competing businesses first meet they usually attempt to find common ground in their common humanity and their common frustrations.  So here I am trying to make a good first impression.  I start with a joke and I look through the news for something to beat up McCain with.

There is nothing there.  The closest I can find is a breakthrough Alzheimer’s treatment.

When I dig deeper I find that he doesn’t have cancer.   I search wider to learn that he’s trying to show independence and he is an “unabashed” conservative.  Big whoop. Like I haven’t known that he was independent and shameless since he hooked up with John Edwards for that patient’s rights bill in ‘01.

McCain has got to be the slowest moving target on the political freeway.  Any conservative position he takes is a flip-flop and any liberal one is redundant.  He’s stuck.  His free range maverick ways now leave him mud sucked, unable to move left or right.  His sole attraction for the Republicans is he didn’t actually obstruct President Bush’s policies on Iraq or Afghanistan.  The number of attractions he presents Democrats challenge enumeration.

It is to McCain’s ironic misfortune that Democrats emote rather than think.  The voters he should be able to rely upon cannot consider him.  Entranced with Barack Obama’s looks and kindness and vigor, they are unconflicted while rejecting John Kerry’s partner on CAFE standards, Paul Sarbanes‘ backer on corporate oversight, Senator Charles Robb’s cosponsor for military base closings, Lieberman’s across-the-aisle buddy on global warming and Ted Kennedy’s on immigration reform.  Democrats are unmindful, a sadly accurate adjective, while abandoning the Senator that stood with them against President Bush’s tax cuts, federal embryonic stem cell research funding bans, and Supreme Court nominees.

A jilted McCain must turn away from the spectacle of Democrats swooning over their latest everlasting love d’jour and face Republicans unimpressed with his cleverness.  The media that called him ‘Darling’ has tossed him aside to chase a younger, more slender tart with an easy smile and vacant eyes.  Oh, the heart break of it all.

It puts a grin on my face, but I’m cold like that.

The only thing left for McCain or the Republicans is to calculate the proposed cost of Obama’s excesses and track the many dangerously dumb ideas Obama has had in order to scare people into voting for the dead guy.

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