can't help but feel sorry for my old Republican friends in Congress who are fighting for their political lives. After all, it must be tough explaining to voters at their local Baptist church's Keep Congress Conservative Day that it was their party that took a $155 billion surplus and turned it into a record-setting $400 billion deficit.
How exactly does one convince the teeming masses that Republicans deserve to stay in power despite botching a war, doubling the national debt, keeping company with Jack Abramoff, fumbling the response to Hurricane Katrina, expanding the government at record rates, raising cronyism to an art form, playing poker with Duke Cunningham, isolating America and repeatedly electing Tom DeLay as their House majority leader?
How does a God-fearing Reagan Republican explain all that away?
Easy. Blame George W. Bush.
Escaping political death by attacking an unpopular president is hardly new -- especially since most endangered politicians have the loyalty of a starving billy goat. But this is Dubya's Washington, where the White House has pushed around, bullied and betrayed GOP lawmakers for years.
Republican House members and senators always believed that this White House took them for granted. But after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, most of them had no choice but to sulk in their cloakrooms, listen to Debby Boone on their iPods and take it like a man. Bush was a rock star among the party faithful through the 2004 election, so crossing this popular commander in chief was not an option. That's not to say that Old Bulls didn't privately growl about how they were treated better when their old nemesis was still frolicking with an intern. So what if Bill Clinton misbehaved? At least that president found time to personally negotiate terms of subcommittee markups -- even if he was defiling the Oval Office at the same time.
But that kind of give-and-take between presidents and members of Congress ended once Clinton retired to Chappaqua. For the next five years, Republicans on the Hill would do little more than rubber-stamp Bush's domestic and international agenda because lawmakers were intimidated by his power and his popularity with the Republican base.
[snip]
That silence -- proof that it is better to be feared than loved in politics -- has had devastating results. The United States is more divided than ever, our leaders are despised around the world, our fiscal situation is catastrophic and congressional approval ratings are the lowest ever. Since nothing sharpens the mind like a political hanging, Republican leaders in the Senate and House are finally considering doing what effete newspaper editorialists have suggested for years: throwing Bush overboard.
Of course, the mere suggestion makes some Republican loyalists shudder. Being a faithful follower of Brother Bush has long been synonymous with loving Jesus, supporting the troops and taking a stand against sodomy. But no more. Many of the conservatives who put Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich in power are counting the days until Bush goes to Crawford for good. Some mutter that their leader's governing style looks more like Jimmy Carter's every day -- and among that crowd, there is no harsher insult.
Scarborough has been somewhat less wingnutty than usual in recent weeks. Perhaps it's the overwhelmingly positive response, much of it in the form of improved ratings, to Keith Olbermann's recent commentaries on Rumsfeld and Bush. Perhaps Joe is smarter than we have him credit for being, and he's really recognized that the emperor is naked. Maybe he already knew, but he, too, chose to play along. But when Scarborough is speaking well of Bill Clinton, reality has been completey inverted.
The book Miss Piggy's Guide to Life had this piece of advice on how to look glamorous while dining out: choose homely dinner companions. It remains to be seen whether the Democrats can succeed in painting George W. Bush's petulant, whiny voice and ugly gargoyle of a simian face on every Republican who has enabled him the last five years. My guess is that the answer is no, since so many of them (Senators Kerry and Clinton, never MIND Joe Lieberman -- I'm talking to you) participated in the enabling as well.
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