William Rivers Pitt, OpEd News, July 5, 2009
What the hell is going on with Republican politics lately?
Insane southpaw Bill “Spaceman” Lee once described Boston Red Sox baseball (pre-2004, of course) as high tragic opera, the kind of shattering long-running mental and emotional experience that leaves one with arms flung heavenward screaming, “Why, God, why?”
One must assume there were very many Republican strategists greeting the Saturday dawn in painfully similar fashion. It would not come as a tremendous surprise if reports surface next week about a rain of frogs and plague of locusts striking Republican National Committee headquarters.
I mean, seriously. This is getting entirely out of hand. The Republican Party, its adherents and its advocates have been running an astonishing gauntlet of shame, silliness and disgrace for four long years now. Randy “Duke” Cunningham went to jail for accepting $1.3 million in bribes, Bob Ney pleaded guilty to accepting bribes as well, Tom DeLay got indicted for money-laundering, Jack Abramoff lobbied half the GOP members of Congress into federal investigations, Mark Foley went sideways with Congressional pages while Dennis Hastert covered it up, Larry Craig tapped his foot in a bathroom stall and got busted for solicitation, and Ted Haggard, minister and leader of one of the largest evangelical churches in America and a pillar of the GOP base, was discovered enjoying meth parties with homosexual prostitutes in his spare time.
This deluge of ignominy eventually resulted in a ravaging defeat at the polls for the GOP in the November 2006 midterm elections. There was, and remains, nothing particularly inspiring or exceptional about the Democratic Party which routed them and took back Congress that year – they were, and remain, a fairly bland and timid lot in the main – but the GOP was just so bad that the country abandoned them, thus beginning the long, slow crumbling of Karl Rove’s dream of a permanent Republican majority.
The pattern continued two years later when John McCain concluded perhaps the most preposterously poor presidential campaign in American history with a decisive defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, who almost literally came down with the last drop of rain but was more than able to upend a badly damaged Republican Party.
1 response so far ↓
Kevin // July 24, 2009 at 8:05 am |
Of the Republicans you mentioned, Cunningham, Ney, Delay, Foley, Hastert, Craig, add “Scumbag” Danforth,….and Senators Vitter and Ensign,…and questionable characters like Senators Domenici and Coburn…. even Gov Sanborn… and the irreversibly stupid Senator McCain….all of whom remain in their very lucrative tax-paid seats.
Each and every of them voted to impeach or convict President Clinton….all demanded his resignation…. raising a sexual tryst with unmarried consenting woman…to the level of a “high crime” worthy of removing the elected president of the United States of America from office….a President who, near as we can tell, remained about 70% popular throughout that disgraceful embarrassing spectacle conducted by the GOP before the law, the country and the world.
And thus the “great right-wing conspiracy” started by the lame-duck Bush Senior in Somalia December of 1992….succeeded in keeping election 2000 doubtful enough in Florida?….so Daddy’s Supreme Court appointees (no recusal?) could elevate Junior to the trophy room.. …and the rest as they say…is history….bad history.
The hell and immorality of all this is the hypocrisy of those mentioned above who voted to impeach President Clinton over a sexual moral issue. And their perversion of the US Constitution and abuse of power.
I am sorry to say that without the utter ignorance and stupidity of the American people they would not have succeeded. They should have all, every single one of them, been turned out from Congress and the Senate by the voters in 2000. Instead they were, for reasons that will forever baffle me, rewarded with a total elected dominance of the government….They should have known better.
And we all know now what the consequences of having amoral hypocrites and liars running the show.