You know that we are are on target with our knives when the NY Times squeals thusly.
Posted on 11/26/2004 10:34:31 PM PST by neverdem
Flexing their new muscles, Congressional Republicans seem intent on reigning as a dissent-smothering monolith. First, House G.O.P. members slavishly obeyed the maneuver by Tom DeLay, the majority leader, to render his control of the caucus ethics-proof by making it possible for a party leader to keep his post even if he is under indictment. His counterpart in the Senate, Bill Frist, was more discreet but no less ham-handed. He has engineered a rules change designed to cow the few Republican moderates who may still be willing to nip back at demands for party fealty.
The rule undercuts members' independence by giving Dr. Frist the power to fill the first two vacancies on all committees. This hobbles seniority, which has been the traditional path to power. The leader now has a cudgel for shaping the "world's greatest deliberative body" into a chorus line. Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, chronic Republican maverick, got to the heart of the matter in skewering her leader's accomplishment: "There is only one reason for that change, and it is to punish people."
Toadying, of course, would avoid punishment. (Senator Arlen Specter's flirtation with independence already seems shaken by anti-abortion zealots.) Yet in a perverse way, this hubris by the Senate's more potent conservative bloc compounds the value of any dissent. The rule may even brace moderates to stand faster against extreme G.O.P. initiatives.
But nastiness is in the air as the new Congress limbers up. Democrats vow to never forget Dr. Frist's foray into South Dakota to help unhorse his counterpart, Tom Daschle, the minority leader, whose farewell speech was boycotted by a victorious, decidedly unsentimental majority. Dr. Frist, who many expect to run for president next time, seems beyond the range of minority Democrats, but not G.O.P. moderates seething at the rules change.
NYT does not approve,RINOS are miffed...sounds good to me!
Those Dems can dish it out, but they sure can't take it! Go Sen. Frist!!
You know that we are are on target with our knives when the NY Times squeals thusly.
Snowe & the NYT's are unhappy? WooHoo!! Well done Mr. Frist!
Good news from Congress and the House tonight.
Slowly, but surely, those guys are growing nuts. I really do wonder about the patience of the women those guys hang around with. They are just too slow making a decision. A few less dinner parties would do well.
pleasingly so....I'm proud of Frist...surprises me a bit.
is DeLay coaching him on how to be tough even if you look like a ...well....like a cardiologist..lol (i'm of course very fond of cardiologists as you might well imagine)
DeLay looks like what he is...a sportin fella....like Dubya for that matter.
I still love the way W waded into the Chile dust up....a bit risky to be sure but very real....and honest....a regular hombre.
Is that what they call his warning to the president, on the president's election victory. Also, I have never heard the term "pro-abortion zealots".
Frist must have burglarized Hillary's office and stolen a set.
I hope Frist starts to act like the leader of a Majority Party -- learn from Hastert.
Hastert Launches A Partisan Policy
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1289172/posts
And heaven knows that Democrats never did this sort of thing when they had the majority! ROTFLOL!
The NY Slimes doesn't even bother with even the pretense of impartiality. They're all pink...right down to their underwear.
...was appointed the coveted position of Head Senate Librarian.
LVM
This is why liberals run-and-get elected as republicans in liberal states...and continue to get elected as republicans in those liberal states. seniority should not be the primary criteria... ever.
The first thought that crossed my mind when I read the part about Olympia Snowe was, "I wonder if the New York Times ever referred to Senator Miller as a "maverick"?
The Left's pundits think that Rove is behind the Frist/Bush crusade. The Left's political insiders think that DeLay is behind it.
The truth of the matter is that Frist was chosen to replace Lott because the Republican leadership was and is mad at the one-sided anti-GOP news media coverage that lets the Democrats attack our guys for the slightest misstep (Lott told a one-line joke, once, at a birthday party for Thurmond, and that cost him his job)...and because Frist was the meanest, smartest Senator with Republican seniority.
And this really follows the grassroots pattern that we've seen since 1994. Our country keeps electing harder-Right politicians, in ever-larger numbers, year after year for the past decade.
You know, pre-9/11, back in 2000, GWB was the most Right Presidential candidate who could have possibly been elected at that time.
Now our nation has moved far enough to the Right that you actually hear the far Right bashing Bush for sometimes not being conservative and cowboy-enough!
Man, the voters of America today would have labeled President Nixon as a freaking left-wing Rino with his opening up of China, founding the EPA, wage and price controls, pulling out of Vietnam, etc... yet until GWB came along, Nixon was regarded as the farthest to the Right that an elected American President could get!
This trend will only get better. The Baby Boom generation is 4 years from being old enough to get Social Security, and each year more and more of them are becoming first time grandparents (the *most* conservative demographic age).
Technology will show that mothers are carrying babies, not tissue, so abortion will be killed off as a Democratic position (pun intended), and Democrats have already given up on gun control after we've handed them ten straight years of defeats over that point.
So on isssue after issue, the Right stands to win, win, and win again and again and again.
...And Americans like winners. The more that the Right wins, the more Americans will join our side. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
Life is good.
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