Saturday, January 07, 2006
Leading the Fools
Leading the fools’ charge into the guns of reality, “conservative” cannon fodder mount a last-ditch effort to retake the high ground before the November elections.
As I predicted, minimization is the preferred tool. Chris Matthews says that the Abramoff scandal won’t even be the biggest event of the year, even as other MSM figures and progressive sources call it the biggest scandal in generations. The dedicated righties like those at Powerline Blog, who have a vested interest in this like Faust had an interest in the Devil, predict that this will all blow over soon. Noooothing to look at here. Move along, just move along. No similarity whatsoever to the scandals that plagued democrats in the early nineties.
They’re right on that count, but not how they think. The Banking Scandal was just a bunch of congresspeople using the House Bank to let them overdraft checks for up to the amount of their next paycheck. We’re talking about 23 people convicted of issuing themselves illegal two-week loans, for God’s sake. The Post Office Scandal was over democrats shielding Rostenkowski from investigation into his money laundering. Abramoff’s 82 million dwarfs these scandals.
If there’s one thing people in this country don’t have patience for it’s graft. I have no idea why raping the environment just doesn’t show up on their radar; I don’t know why blowing up deficits or lying people into war is so defensible. But with the Abramoff scandal even dyed-in-the-wool repugs are scrambling for cover like rats off a sinking ship.
Even David Brooks and Newt Gingrich are getting twitchy. Real Clear Politic’s Blog is crying out for a change in republican leadership. The Chicago Tribune and other conservative editorial boards are suggesting that if republicans don’t clean up their act they will be rightly swept from office in 2006.
Advocating torture didn’t faze these thugs one bit. A war based on lies? Who cares. We just need to keep looking forward and win. Ballooning deficit? We’ll reign in spending soon enough.
But good old-fashioned graft? The kind of stuff that happens legally every day in Washington and throughout the private sector? Noooo!!!
I guess I’m just not that smart. Graft has saturated our republic for generations, and it’s been getting worse gradually. Every five years or so the number of lobbyists in Washington doubles. Congress has egregiously failed to get money out of politics for years, even when it was becoming apparent that cash for politics was being discretely traded with every handshake and wink.
All of a sudden the inevitable scandal breaks. You can’t keep a $16 billion a year business under wraps forever. And now they’re scared.
DeLay is out. When democrats wanted him out, to quote DeLay, Southern Partisan, Sean Hannity, and a million other fascist toadies, the democrats were politicizing normal government fundraising. Now that Abramoff is squealing, however, even many conservative blogs are saying Tom has got to go.
Adios, Mr. DeLay. Not that it matters much. He’ll still be in congress.
What amuses me is that conservatives think, rightly or not, that they can salvage the Titanic with a couple of arc welders. That they can convince the American people that Blunt, somehow, is a whole different kind of guy. If they fail they’re idiots. If they succeed the American people are idiots.
The Republican Party has been the cat’s paw of big business for longer than I’ve been alive. Changing one republican for another is a joke. Expecting republicans to clean their own house is a joke.
This is the party that brought you Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, and Bill Frist. Who are the democratic corollaries to these guys? Dan Rostenkowski? Anybody else?
There isn’t anyone else. For every Jim Traficant there’s a Duke Cunningham. The difference is that Jim Traficant didn’t run his party. Tom DeLay did. Trent Lott did. Newt Gingrich did. Bill Frist does.
What do you expect from the party of Richard Nixon and George Wallace? What reforms are you expecting from the home of Strom Thurmond, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, and Jesse Helms?
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 3:20 AM 
