Return of the W-h-i-i-n-e-r-s Not a Pretty Sight

posted by Bill Arnett @ 10:37 AM Permalink

For many years now Democrats have found themselves wandering the wilderness, living off the meager legislative scraps thrown to them like treats to small yapping dogs by the Republican majorities. The rubber-stamping rethugs have, over those same years, spent their time quietly destroying America's freedom, appointing unqualified but loyal bushies throughout government, mismanaging an ill-begotten war, passing laws in the dead of night, changing the law proposed illegally by adding provisions AFTER both bodies have signed off on it and getting the president to sign it before anyone notices, passing 10,000 pages of legislation with only a day or less for anyone to review it and discover all the little traps, and, in general, screwing America and Americans in every way possible overtly and covertly.

They have, through those years, also made an apparently permanent underclass of political whiners calling themselves Democrats, Liberal Democrats, Progressive Democrats or whatever else they want, but my point is the same.

W-H-I-I-I-I-N-N-E-R-S. For many of the last days I have been reading articles from otherwise intelligent people who seem to think that, after the Republicans have spent all these years burying America in shame, the Democratic leadership of congress is an abject failure that has not only betrayed the people electing them, but that they have been, additionally, totally unable to single-handedly save the world in the just barely five months of rule without a veto-proof majority. and in the face of Republican promises to obfuscate and obstruct every thing the Democrats want to do.

I mean, really, just what did everyone expect? If anyone REALLY believed Democrats could save the world, end the war, bring all the troops home, lower gas prices, save the housing market, restore fiscal responsibility, end poverty, and provide health insurance for everyone in five short months with Republican obstructionism in attack mode, well, they simply set their expectations too high and unreasonably so.

Monroe Anderson, an opinion writer, wrote a rant about it. I refuted his arguments line-by-line and the owner of that site thought I was perhaps unfair and took Anderson's side, so out of respect to him I deleted a very heartfelt post. But it was nothing more a column trashing democrats relentlessly, while giving the party of Obstructionism a free pass.

Now Keith Olbermann, who certainly should know better, has climbed on the same bandwagon of savaging democrats for failing to correct debacles that were many years in the making. Very disappointing that such a national figure would fail to use the cognitive facilities he possesses in spades to urge the restraint of such harsh rhetoric and himself fail to recognize what he knows well: Nothing moves fast in Washington and it just isn't possible to get everything, or even most of what the people want done, immediately.

Well, THAT is a bandwagon upon which I will not leap, and for the primary reason why I give you with the World According to Norquist, the demi-god and chief strategist of the rethugs, who had these orders for the Republicans at the last CPAC Convention, as I noted in a prior post.:

Transcript:

NORQUIST: Nothing good happens in the next two years out of this Congress. Nothing good.…If you read in the newspaper that there’s a bill with a nice sounding name, and it sounds in the first sentence like the bill is good, you haven’t read the whole bill.…Nothing good happens. They’re not going to cut taxes.…(APPLAUSE)…Look,get married, develop a hobby, learn to belly dance, learn to golf — you know, we got two years free, but we gotta spend some time and effort playing defense here.…Because the Democrats are going to be like young men on prom dates — they’re gonna keep asking the same question of us over and over and over again. And our job is to say “no, no, no, no” for two years.…It doesn’t do us any good to go “no, no, yes” okay? It has to be “no” for two years in a row. It’s going to be tiresome, it’s going to be boring. People are gonna go, “oh maybe this bill isn’t as bad as it looks.” Don’t eat it, don’t swallow it, don’t touch it. Nothing good passes this Congress.…Plan for the future and read novels.

And while they read those novels, belly dance, and obstruct everything so nothing gets done, the Democratic Party and the talking heads who now criticize them just keep on whining: maybe you will thusly aid the rethugs in suppressing the vote so much that the rethugs can achieve majority status again.

So as Speaker Pelosi says, "…[everyone] needs to just take a deep breath and calm down." Given time, support, and another election to get us more democratic leaders, things will improve.

Unless all the talking heads continue to trash dems instead of throwing Grover Norquist's words back into the faces of the rethugs at every opportunity and show and tell about every rethug piece of obstructionism that is preventing the dems from obtaining their agenda.

Either that or whine so badly about dems that a permanent Republican majority is elected next year. Now THAT'S cutting your nose off to spite your face.

Labels: Bush, Conservatives, corruption, GOP, Norquist, politics