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Arlen Specter takes his parting shots at the GOP (“compromise has become a dirty word“) and remarks on the dwindling number of moderate Republicans.
“Eating or defeating your own is a form of sophisticated cannibalism.”
Cannibalism? Sure. Sophisticated? Not really. There is nothing sophisticated about teabagger’s attempt to cleanse a party that has taken an ugly hard turn to the right. Purity rituals are always a messy affair.
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…like a senator scorned.
One of Pres. Obama‘s biggest supporters in the Senate in the past week is not even a member of his own party: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).
Murkowski supported the president’s position on the Senate’s four biggest votes since last Wednesday. She and fellow Alaska Sen. Mark Begich (D) voted in favor of the tax cut compromise and to invoke cloture on New START treaty, the Dream Act and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Both senators also voted in favor of the final repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell on Saturday.
No Senate Republican voted for all four bills other than Murkowski. And the senior senator from Alaska, who became a national figure this year when she defeated attorney Joe Miller (R) with her write-in campaign, has actually been a more reliable vote for the president than 18 members of the Senate Democratic caucus since Dec. 15.
One of the sweeter outcomes from the midterms was the defeat of the smug, teabag-sucking Joe Miller. The GOP’s poster boy had his senate dream shattered by Murkowski. She now finds herself in the same position that Joe Lieberman found himself after being scorned by the Democratic heirarchy. Payback time.
Murkowski is a full-fledged conservative but look for her to buck the party line anytime she wishes. She owes her allegiance to no man. Nice.
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The left has debated and criticized Republican obstructionism for the last two years…all to no avail. So it always gives me a bit of hope (and pleasure) when conservatives of note venture out into the Forbidden land and knock their own party on their destructive and partisan ways.
David Stockman, one of Ronald Reagan’s economic gurus, on CNN yesterday.
– We need “a higher tax burden on the upper income.”
– “After 1985, the Republican Party adopted the idea that tax cuts can solve the whole problem, and that therefore in the future, deficits didn’t matter and tax cuts would be the solution of first, second, and third resort.”
– The 2001 Bush tax cut “was totally not needed.”
– On claims that Reagan proved tax cuts lead to higher government revenues: “Reagan proved nothing of the kind and yet that became the mantra and it just led the Republican Party away from its traditional sound money, fiscal restraint.”
– Former Vice President Cheney “should have known better” than claim the Bush tax cuts would pay for themselves.
– “I’ll never forgive the Bush administration and Paulson for basically destroying the last vestige of fiscal responsibility that we had in the Republican Party. After that, I don’t know how we ever make the tough choices.”
Stockman might not forgive Bush but the rest of his party surely has. If anything, they’re still calling for the exact same economic policies which led to the collapse.
Then there’s the START nuclear arms control treaty. Republicans, led by Sen. John Kyl, are blocking its ratification. Dick Lugar, the ranking GOP member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been a loyal Republican and has fought against both the stimulus bill and health care reform. On this issue though, he’s somehow found the courage to confront his fellow Republicans.
“Please do your duty for your country. We do not have verification of the Russian nuclear posture right now. We’re not going to have it until we sign the START treaty. We’re not going to be able to get rid of further missiles and warheads aimed at us. I state it candidly to my colleagues, one of those warheads…could demolish my city of Indianapolis — obliterate it! Now Americans may have forgotten that. I’ve not forgotten it and I think that most people who are concentrating on the START treaty want to move ahead to move down the ladder of the number of weapons aimed at us.”
And then there is Brent Scowcroft who is willing to call out the GOP for putting party before country.
“It’s not clear to me what it is,” said Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush who noted that this START treaty is not very different from previous ones negotiated and ratified under Republican presidents. “I’ve got to think that it’s the increasingly partisan nature and the desire for the president not to have a foreign policy victory.”
Yep. It really is that simple. Analyze it all you want but it always comes back to the single goal Republicans have had since January 2008 – whatever Obama proposes, regardless of its value to the nation, stop it. As for Lugar and Scowcroft, they’ll be ripped apart by conservative hacks for daring to stray away from The Plan. After all, with only two years to go before the next general election, this is no time to make truth and integrity a part of Republican politics.
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This is funny.
Even Norm Coleman thinks it’s time for Joe Miller to give up his Alaska Senate fight. “I think that race is over,” Coleman said in an interview that will air this Sunday on C-SPAN’s Newsmakers. “I think the counting’s been done I’m not sure there’s anything that would change that.”
“It should be time to move on,” he said. “There’s not much that you can gain by extending the process.”
Yes, that’s the same Norm Coleman who dragged out his Senate race with Al Franken for eight months and brought it all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court. This was after a bipartisan state canvassing board had declared Franken the victor two months after the election.
It does not appear Miller has any intention of following Coleman’s advice. On Monday he filed suit in Fairbanks Superior Court asking them to disallow any write-in ballots showing a faulty spelling of Murkowskee’s Merkowski’s Murkowski’s name. Obviously, voter intent has little meaning for teabaggers.
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Yesterday I had a piece on Democrats’ cowardly ways. Greg Sargent adds more.
One last nugget from Richard Wolffe’s new book on the Obama White House. In an interview with Wolffe, the President seemed to acknowledge that in pursuing bipartisan support for health reform, he and Democrats got snookered by a previously-thought-out GOP strategy to delay the process for as long as possible in order to politically damage him and the Democratic Party.
Here’s the President on page 75:
“You have to give the Republicans credit, just from a pure political perspective, that they used every instrument available to them in the Senate to prolong the process in such a way that helped drive down support nationally, that gave everybody a sense that somehow Washington was broken,” he told me. “At a time when everybody was worrying about jobs, for us to have to spend six to nine months on this piece of legislation obviously was not helpful.”
Ok, wonderful. He supposedly gets it. Now what? Each time Dems give in to Republican demands, the goal posts get shifted further to the right. What is it going to take for the President to realize that the only end zone that matters for Republicans is the one that has them occupying the Oval Office in 2012?
Sargent is absolutely right in stating that there was no reason for the health care debate to drag on for as long as it did. It was quite evident within the first month or so that Republicans had no desire to reach agreement on any part of reform. By allowing Republicans to define the issues along their terms, Democrats saw public opinion on reform shift dramatically away from what it was at the beginning of 2009. And so it has been with every other issue Democrats have attempted to deal with in Congress.
How many more times does the anvil need to fall squarely on their heads before the President and Democrats really do indeed get it? It might be time to replace the Democratic donkey with a pic of a clueless Wiley E. Coyote.
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