Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Minority Leadership: Republicans STILL don't get it...

Columnist Jeff Jacoby astutely observes that of all people, the person who best understands the recent Republican congressional losses is....Bill Clinton!


The reason we are at this moment," former president Bill Clinton told a group of Democratic donors on Nov. 1, "is that they do not represent faithfully the Republicans and the more conservative independents in the country. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here tonight. This is a sweeping, deep, big thing."

According to the nation's most popular Democrat, in other words, Republicans were about to be punished for having abandoned their Republican principles. Voters were going to demote the GOP not because its agenda had grown too conservative — but because it hadn't been conservative enough.
Note that the new House and Senate Democrats who have won election are, or are at least pretending to be, "Blue Dog" or "Boll Weevil" Democrats, not Demunist Dhimmicrat Commiecrats. That ought to tell us something right there.

But who are the Republicans picking as minority leadership? The same old, same old, who let this mess happen. They just don't get it....

For House Minority Leader, the business-as-usual Rep. John Boehner of Ohio defeated true conservative Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana in a closed-door election among colleagues. The vote tally was 168-27 with one vote for Texas Rep. Joe Barton.

The business-as-usual Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., won minority whip, despite heavy sentiment for true conservative Rep. John Shadegg, R-Az.

And the Senate Minority Leader now? The pork-barrelling Trent Lott!

No I don't care about the Left's bogus cries of "racism" trap. Lott's remarks at a dying old senator's 100th birthday party were in retrospect harmless, just as that now deceased senator turned out to be.

The real problem with Trent Lott is that his attitude towards pork, and especially his attitude about the people who oppose pork spending, perfectly encapsulates why voters have grown disgusted with Congress and the Republican majority.

One of the major legislative reforms that came out of the last session of Congress was the bipartisan Tom Coburn - Barack Obama spending database. Bill Frist managed to expertly get that through in the last days of the legislative calendar. However, that dexterous performance only became necessary because Lott used an arcane Senate rule to kill the database back in March. Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., offered the database in an amendment to a lobbying reform bill under consideration, and Trent Lott invoked Rule 22, which stripped the amendment from the bill for its supposed irrelevance to lobbying reform.

This naturally inspired a lot of criticism from the Blogosphere, which has focused on earmarks (especially secret earmarks) as a point of entry for corruption in Congress. In response to this criticism, Lott told an AP reporter that “I’ll just say this about the so-called Porkbusters. I’m getting damn tired of hearing from them.”

In other words, Lott is a pathetic and lame politician who belongs to a generation of politicians that believe that they are above the criticism of their constituents, and that we should just shut up and let our betters decide what to do with us. I expect that from the Politboro of Demunist Commiecrats, but not from Republicans.

If the Republicans in Congress think people like Lott represent what the GOP learned from being stripped of their majority, then Republicans should prepare to spend more than a few years in the wilderness.

Perhaps we can count on the Moonbat Marxists and Demunist Dhimmicrat Commiecrats to do something really stupid, like John Conyers pushing for impeachment hearings, to save us. Or perhaps the newbie Boll Weevils and Blue Dogs will balk at how the senior Demunist Dhimmicrat Commiecrats tell them to vote. Pelosi's push for John Murtha rather than Stenny Hoyer to be House Majority Leader was a good sign, although that apparently has more to do with a personal vendetta between the Pelosi and Hoyer political families rather than ideology. Before San Fran Nan was San Fran Nan, she lived in Maryland, and her political family clashed with the Hoyers.

But I'd rather have proactive Republicans who actually understand what went wrong, rather than just rely on moonbats to be moonbats!

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