Yet another reason to view Hugh Hewitt as more of a carnival barker than a thinker to be taken seriously:
President Bush will not flag in the pursuit of the war, and Senator Santorum is now available for a seat on the SCOTUS should one become available.
Yikes. And if that's not bad enough, look at this:
Handed a large majority, the GOP frittered it away. The chief fritterer was Senator McCain and his Gang of 14 and Kennedy-McCain immigration bill, supplemented by a last minute throw down that prevented the NSA bill from progressing or the key judicial nominations from receiving a vote. His accomplice in that master stroke was Senator Graham. Together they cost their friend Mike DeWine his seat in the Senate, and all their Republican colleagues their chairmanships. Senator McCain should rethink his presidential run. Amid the ruins of the GOP's majority there is a clear culprit.
Well yes, there is, but it sure as hell isn't John McCain. If you want to find the clear culprit, look no further than the man in the White House. For crying out loud, does Hewitt really think that if the Republicans had just played tougher on judicial appointments and passed the NSA wiretapping bill then this election would have played out differently? If so, he is suffering from terminal cluelessness. The vast majority of the public knows nothing and cares even less about judicial appointments, and they don't care much more about the legal niceties of the NSA wiretapping program.
What do they care about? A war that has turned into a boondoggle due to the astonishingly shortsighted planning of this administration. Another foreign adventure that seems to be blowing up in our faces and creating more enemies while not making us any safer. They care about the ever-increasing number of body bags coming home from Iraq without any positive accomplishment to show for it. They care about government spending that is completely out of control, and with only one party in charge of the entire budget process they know exactly who to blame for it.
They also care about a seemingly endless series of Republican politicians, including those in the leadership, being guilty of corruption. In the wake of Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney and Mark Foley, the public sees that the Republicans they voted in to office 14 years ago to clean up politics have only made it dirtier. In the 80s, it was Tip O'Neill, Jim Wright, Dan Rostenkowski and other Democratic leaders who were entrenched in positions of authority and using them to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense. They voted out that gang and put Gingrich and his friends in power instead on the promise that they would clean things up. The reformers quickly became just as entrenched in their positions of power and began to abuse the system in all the same ways. It's gotten so bad that even prominent conservative leaders have been saying that the best thing that could happen to the Republican is to lose. So now they're throwing those bums out too. And a decade from now, we may well be telling the same story in reverse; welcome to modern democracy.
That's why Republicans lost. Because the public has seen one-party rule for the last 6 years, they've seen how bad it is, and the only thing they could do to fix it was to put the other party in control of the legislature. And that doesn't have a damn thing to do with John McCain, the NSA wiretapping bill or judicial appointments.
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Great post, Ed.
And just in addition, the Republicans did not lose on Tuesday because of anything the flaccid Democrats did either. It was a win by default and that to me makes this celebration a little less jovial.
egbooth said -
It was a win by default and that to me makes this celebration a little less jovial.
That just gives me hope that the democrats won't end up in the same position that the republicans have been in the last six years.
As a watcher of netroots progressivism, I can say I hope we continue to defeat K-Street/DC whores like Rahm Emmanuel and Hillary in in the Democratic primaries to keep fighting cronyism and hackitude from within.
Hewitt isn't nuts. He's just the hackiest of movement conservative hacks. Have you listened to any of his recent interviews?
Ed,
Thanks for putting me off my feed with the image of a "Justice Santorum".
For any court historians out there; Has there ever been a Supreme Court Justice who's last name is synonymous with the by product of a sex act? I mean besides "Thomas" meaning to adorn a Coke can with a pubic hair.
raindogzilla-
Well, you know what they say. Once Hugo Black....
Were Bush to nominate Santorum, he'd be crucified in Senate hearings (if he even got them).
I agree that given enough time--four to eight years will do--the Democrats will be just as corrupt as the current Republicans, but without most of the atrocious policies. Given that seeming inevitability just begs the need for mandating a major change in how campaigns are run. The current need to buy TV time makes money critical. We must demand that Congress change the rules so that fund raising is not the addiction that drives Congressional behavior. Weaned from fundraising, some representatives and Senators might actually do the people's business.
My feeling is that wide margins tend to give us the cycle of corruption. The lobbyists zero in on the party that wields the power to get them what they want, and they always corrupt them eventually.
The key is to keep margins slim, and so no one party can get overly entrenched and overly corrupted.
That's my $0.02.
Well it never caught on, but long ago Gore Vidal wrote a really bad sequel to Myra Breckenridge called Myron and apparently Vidal was having censor problems so he replaced all the dirty words with the names of antipornography crusaders. Supreme Court Justice "Whizzer" White was thus immortalized as male genitalia.
It seems Hewitt and the repugs are doing all sorts of intellectual calisthenics to avoid the obvious conclusion. They just can't face the idea that maybe, just maybe it was their idiotic, ideologically based policies that caused the horrible mess in Iraq. Let's also not forget that the party of "family values" seems to have slipped off its moral high horse and landed face down in the mud.
"Oh, it couldn't be that, now could it? Of course not! Let's go find some scapegoats! Hey, there's John McCain!"....and out come the knives.
Don't know which I like better. Seeing so many Dems win on Tuesday night or watching Repug wingnuts bash each other over the head.
But there's a silver lining in that they don't have any particular constituency they now owe favors to (like the Rs and the Religious Right). This gives me some small hope that they'll focus on actually accomplishing something.
I don't know if I agree so much with the "Dems had nothing to offer but voters were sick of the other guys" line. Quite a few of the democrats who won did so as economic populists and "live and let live" social moderates. See Tester and Brown for that.
I think people are not just sick of corruption, but they're seeing that movement conservatism is a failure. It hasn't improved their lives, they're stuck with more and more radical extremists representing them, the ship of state is heading increasingly toward an intrusive-government and authoritarian iceberg, and their getting frustrated and uneasy about the direction. Plenty of Americans are getting tired of being told that some members of their family or their neighbors are traitors (liberal) or sinister carriers of immorality (gay). Most importantly, it hasn't improved the lot of the majority of wage earners but it has made the already rich filthy. That is one thing sure to generate anger.
The Iraq War is the repository for people's growing anger. It is certainly a shining example of hubris and incompetence, and reason enough to throw the bums out, but I think people channeled their growing frustration and unease with what's been going on in general into that vehicle.
There is a real desire for a return to equity in our society. Many of the Dems who won this week campaigned at least in part on that idea. I'm hoping that that is what we're going to see growing out of the rancor and self-indulgence of the post-vietnam era.
Hugh Hewitt is comically stupid. Amusingly stupid. If president bush slapped a 10-year old boy, Hewitt would say "I'm so glad the democrats weren't in power! They would have kicked the kid!" Hewitt is so bad, he even embarrasses some republicans.
Let's have an analogy. Hewitt says that Rick Santorum is qualified for the Supreme Court, now what if I said that Ted Kennedy was qualified for the Supreme Court? Wouldn't that be just as ridiculous? How is it exactly that a theocrat would be qualified to help oversee a secular government? Frankly...I find it more terrifying than funny to think of Santorum on the Supreme Court... But then I remember that Rick got his ass handed to him and I smile knowing that all is not ill in the world.
In all seriousness, "Potter Stewart" (of I know hardcore porn when I see it fame) was used as a term for (I believe) a penis in Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger's Cat trilogy, so it wouldn't be completely without precident.
Handed vast international sympathy for the USA by 9/11, the president frittered it away. Handed a budget surplus - the first since Eisenhower, the president frittered it away. Handed the support of a bipartisan-minded Democratic side after his first election... well you get the idea.
Maybe we should call him "Fritter"
You left out the abandonment of one of the country's oldest
and most distinctive cities.