Dionne: moderates are bad except when they’re good
Remember the good old days of the Bush Administration when moderate Republicans were praised by the media for holding the line against Bush extremism and a rubberstamp Congress? It seems like only yesterday, doesn’t it? Well, suddenly, Democrat moderates are blocking a rubberstamp Congress and Washington Post’s EJ Dionne doesn’t like it one bit;
Last year, the voters gave [President Obama] the largest popular-vote margin won by a presidential candidate in 20 years. They gave Democrats their largest Senate majority since 1976 and their largest House majority since 1992.
Obama didn’t just offer bromides about hope and change. He made specific pledges. You’d think that the newly empowered Democrats would want to deliver quickly.
But what do real Americans see? On health care, they read about this or that Democratic senator prepared to bring action to a screeching halt out of displeasure with some aspect of the proposal. They first hear that a bill will pass by Thanksgiving and then learn it might not get a final vote until after the new year.
Imagine that! Democrats who don’t want to rubberstamp Obama’s agenda. I’ve used the word “rubberstamp” three times because I listened to that term every-damn-day from some stupid media source in regards to the Republican Congress – oddly enough, I don’t hear it these days, so I thought I’d bring the usage back.
But, anyway, remember how praiseworthy it was for Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins to stand against the Republican steamroller in those dark days of Darth Cheney and Tom The Hammer Delay? Well, it’s not so praiseworthy these days;
The rules have changed. The extra-constitutional filibuster is being used by the minority, with extraordinary success, to make the majority look foolish, ineffectual and incompetent. By using Republican obstructionism as a vehicle for forcing through their own narrow agendas, supposedly moderate Democratic senators will only make themselves complicit in this humiliation.
Um, EJ…the rules have stayed the same – it’s the parties that changed. I wonder if lisping EJ Dionne detects the irony in those last few lines.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Congress sucks, Media
Jonn,
You’re right. The ONLY thing that’s changed is the name of the party in power. Even the politics have stayed the same – big gub’ment — weather from the left or the right.
But because the name has changed, the MSM must attack the one they don’t like (Repubs/conservatives) & defend their “friends” (RINOs/SocDem leftist liberals).
I don’t think we’ll be hearing about “moderate” republican for much longer. Snowe cast her vote for getting health care out of committee and had 4500 pounds of rock salt sent to her house from Redstate.com. Graham went on the record supporting Kerry’s cap and trade bill and was officially censured by the South Carolina GOP. Joseph Cao was the lone republican in the House to vote for the House health care bill and now the RNC is saying he will not get re-election funding. Bit by bit the republicans are learning. They will start voting the party line before much longer.
Really, JSV, what would that “party line” be? Snow deserved the rock salt, for 2000 reasons, or for the 111 new Federal bureaucracies that’ll be created by “health care”. As does Grahamnesty. If Cao wanted a public option in health care, he should have run as a dem, and taken their money.