Republican Party Failing America
This week was almost as bad as the Republican meltdown during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Christy Hardin Smith of Firedoglake sums up a week of Republican scandals, blunders and bamboozlements:
I counted 19 items. That's just for one week and there's more out there. Smith is not the only noticing that we're probably just seeing the tip of the iceberg. I suspect before too long that Jason Leopold, Laura Rozen and the crew over at Talking Points Memo will be needing more help keeping track of all the nonsense. This generation of Washington Republicans have a lot to answer for. One gets the impression that there has been a conscious effort to find the most crooked or pliable Republicans to run for office or to run agencies or to handle lobbying duties. And the honest Republicans left don't have a lot of backbone, though there are a few honest Repubican voices who speak up from time to time. Too bad that in the last two years John McCain has been too busy running for president and cozying up to the usual players to be taken seriously any more. He might have made himself useful.
Note on Firedoglake. I stopped reading Firedoglake for a number of weeks. It got so shrill for a while that I didn't find it useful. But there seems to be an effort to right the ship and I hope it continues. There's some smart people there.
I spent a bit of time plodding through the news articles and dispatches this morning, and I am truly struck by the sheer amount of idiocy, corruption, lawbreaking, and bizzaro crap piling up on the Republican side of the fence. Truly, when you look at all of it at one time, you have to ask yourself — what in the hell is going on? While I’d like to think of it as one big, fat dose of karma, I’m honestly wondering how it is that this many chickens have decided to come home to roost at the same time.
And then it hit me that the number of news items might have some correlation to the sheer number of bad acts committed that have yet to be found out by the public – and so, perhaps, we are only looking at the tip of a very ugly iceberg. But before I begin some sort of long, drawn-out schadenfruede hotline call, let me just show you what I mean (and this is only a little snapshot — it is by no means a full round-up, since I don’t have the time to do a full catalogue today)
I counted 19 items. That's just for one week and there's more out there. Smith is not the only noticing that we're probably just seeing the tip of the iceberg. I suspect before too long that Jason Leopold, Laura Rozen and the crew over at Talking Points Memo will be needing more help keeping track of all the nonsense. This generation of Washington Republicans have a lot to answer for. One gets the impression that there has been a conscious effort to find the most crooked or pliable Republicans to run for office or to run agencies or to handle lobbying duties. And the honest Republicans left don't have a lot of backbone, though there are a few honest Repubican voices who speak up from time to time. Too bad that in the last two years John McCain has been too busy running for president and cozying up to the usual players to be taken seriously any more. He might have made himself useful.
Note on Firedoglake. I stopped reading Firedoglake for a number of weeks. It got so shrill for a while that I didn't find it useful. But there seems to be an effort to right the ship and I hope it continues. There's some smart people there.
posted by Craig at 5:34 PM
1 Comments:
Throughout Bush's first term, I marveled at what appeared to be his remarkable luck. On top of that, there seemed to be incredible pliability on the media's part. Things that would've resulted in killer exposés of earlier presidents and their administrations seemd to just go by the boards, again and again.
Somehow, Bush and his people seemed to pull off a feat of suspension of disbelief that got him into the White House and carried right through to the 2004 election (with plenty of help from his $200 million in campaign money).
Ever since last August, however, it's as though the scales have fallen from people's eyes. They're not making excuses for him or buying the excuses he makes any more. Even media types who've been virtually moribund seem to be bestirred by the magnitude of Bush and his cronies' incompetence, and the scale and severity of the consequences of their incompetence.
The more I think about it, the more inclined I am to assign a lot of blame for our current fix to a big chunk of the electorate. Far too many people are willing to give money and votes to the guy who looks, sounds and feels right to them — without bothering much about what he's really about when it comes to politics and policies.
People see a candidate or officeholder on a couple of talk shows, enjoy it when he or she shows up on Letterman or "The Daily Show," and size them up as likeable or not.
Evaluating on the basis of politics and policies requires doing a certain amount of homework, reading, thinking and maybe discussing seriously with others who are reasonably well informed.
So, John Kerry sounds too highfalutin', too nuanced, too longwinded. He's not the guy a bunch of NASCAR fans would prefer to have a few beers with.
Well, we see where electing what was perceived to be some kind of down-home good ol' boy on that flimsy basis leads, and it's not a good place to be.
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