Yet again, we see what Old Democrats these New Democrats are. The great filibusterers of years past were, of course, the segregationist Southern Democrats who used the tactic to block the progress of civil rights.
Dean would claim that his devotion to the modern filibuster has a different and much more high-minded basis, but for a smart guy, he's oddly incoherent when he talks about it:
"I think the change will be dreadful for American democracy, and I think it's going to be, frankly, very bad for the Republican Party. One of the great geniuses of American democracy, unlike most of the democracies in the world that minority rights are protected, 48 percent of us didn't vote for President Bush, but we still have some say in shaping the agenda of the country."
Some very odd stuff in here. If he really thinks getting rid of the filibuster would be bad for the Republicans, why he hell isn't he pushing for it with all his might? And in what sense are the Democrats a "minority"? Yeah, they're a minority party, but since when do parties have "rights"? People have rights, but the only right a party has is to put up candidates -- a right which, incidentally, the Democrats have consistently and strenuously tried to deny to other parties.
Poor Dean has even lost his capacity to do arithmetic -- let's hope he isn't still prescribing medication to anybody, or anybody other than Joe Lieberman, anyway. Dean's 48% figure ignores the 40% of Americans who didn't vote at all. But they don't matter, I guess, because they're not Democrats.
And that brings us to what does matter, which is keeping the dear old brain-dead Democratic party on life support. They're such bungling knuckleheads that they lost a Presidential election to a certified moron in an election that set records for turnout, and at the same time reduced themselves to a pathetic, cowed, and ineffectual rump in Congress. And yet they have the chutzpah to tell us that they're entitled -- as of "right"! -- to some kind of veto on what the victors do. The hell with 'em. Away with all these procedural grotesqueries, and if that leaves the Democrats exposed as the helpless hogtied nonentities they are -- well, so much the better.
Full disclosure: I might not be taking such a Jacobin view of the matter if I thought the Democrats might really do anything good with their filibusters, or even prevent anything bad. But you know they won't. They'll use it to negotiate the terms of surrender -- okay, I'll vote Judge Vlad the Impaler onto the Supreme Court if we can get that highway bypass my owner wants back at home. Deal? Deal!
The congressional Democrats have turned into a kind of political rentiers, expecting to collect an unearned income of influence and horse-trading assets from their vestigial properties on the Hill.
I'm with Lord Keynes on this one: the euthanasia of the rentier can't come too soon, and the political rentier is an even sorrier specimen than the economic one.
ole doc dean
has been medicating me ....
for years
Posted by: uncle joe liber on May 23, 2005 10:09 PM