Right On Republicans – An Update

 

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said yesterday that the “corner has been turned” for the GOP and that his party is in resurgence mode.

 

Naturally it was a right turn around the corner, and according to sources in the Republican leadership who demanded anonymity lest their neighbors find out, the plan is to continue to make right turns. Asked if this plan might not find them right back where they started, the sources said that was the idea.

 

That seemed to contradict Steele as quoted by Politico telling Republicans in Maryland that “The Republican Party is again going to emerge as the party of new ideas.”  Asked to explain the apparent contradiction, sources pointed to the rest of the Steele quote as reported by Politico: “It will take some time, for sure, but it is beginning now.”

 

Asked how much time Steele might have had in mind, all three sources declined to answer, except to say that the core Republican leadership had a rendezvous with Destiny.

 

Destiny, reached at her usual DC street corner, cited client privilege and declined comment except to refer to Steele as quoted recently in The Huffington Post: “But a lot of people have passions and the beauty of the Republican Party is you get to express those passions in various ways."

 

The quote was in response to an effort by some members of the Republican National Committee to label the Democrats as “the Democrat Socialist Party.” Debate among experts over whether that was the height of passion for a Republican was pretty evenly divided, with some blushing in agreement while others backed more traditional Republican passions, standing in tight circles to chant “Tax Cut!” at each other.

 

Even Destiny dodged the question, saying the most important thing was “no rough stuff.”

 

That seemed to echo remarks by Steele, who promised to take on President Obama “with dignity,” in contrast to what he called the “shabby and classless way” that Democrats and leftists disagreed with President Bush. Steele has praised the “Tea Bag” anti-tax protests that happened in several cities, saying “This change comes in a tea bag.”

 

Steele did not clarify whether it was a nickel bag or a dime bag that Republicans were using to foster their vision of change with dignity.

 

Still, change is clearly the watchword for Republicans. On Friday, the blog site of GOP.com cautioned us “5/15/09 Update: What you see here is a placeholder between what was and what is to come for GOP.com. Don't get too used to this page--the complete rebuild is around the corner. Soon we'll have a new look and a more enjoyable, modern, open and participatory way to share our ideals with the Country.”

 

It wasn’t clear whether the GOP blog site was referring to Steele’s corner or its own independent corner or Destiny’s corner. Questioned on the issue of a “complete rebuild," Destiny said “Yeah, I tried that once, but it sags after a while, you know?”

 

It does indeed.

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A Tortured Republican Argument

 

The United States of America routinely tortured suspected terrorists during the administration of Republican George W. Bush, in flagrant violation of American law and tradition.

 

And it’s all Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fault.

 

The Republican National Committee’s website at gop.com, has a page titled “Nancy’s Debunked Denials,” where the text begins in boldface: “New Intelligence Documents Prove That Pelosi Has Not Been Honest About What She Knew And When She Knew It.”

 

The Republican reasoning is that since Pelosi knew about what the RNC stubbornly calls “enhanced interrogation techniques” and failed to stop them, she is complicit in their use.

 

And since she’s complicit in the use of torture, she shouldn’t make it a “political issue,” which is how Republicans prefer to describe conduct that would be a crime if it took place in a police station or jail.

 

The GOP says Pelosi learned about the torture (oops! Enhanced Interrogation) in a Fall 2002 briefing. Pelosi says that briefing’s only mention of water boarding, the torture technique of choice, was that it wasn’t being used.

 

Thoughtful Republicans – there must be a few somewhere – might recall that the “what knew/when knew” query reached its sloganeering peak in the Watergate burglary hearings about another GOP guardian of our liberties, Richard M. Nixon. But let’s not focus on the past, especially the past in which Republican operatives broke the law.

 

We should stay focused on the present in which Republican operatives broke the law because the Democrats failed to stop them.

 

Never mind that Democrats were in the minority in 2002. Today’s Minority Leader John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, is quoted in Wednesday’s New York Times as saying “It’s pretty clear that they were well aware of what these enhanced interrogation techniques were; they were well aware that they’d been used; and it seems to me that they want to have it both ways. You can’t have it both ways.”

 

Sure you can John. You can do the crime, and when you’re caught, you can blame the cops for not preventing you.

 

Not to be outdone by the John Boehner Theory of Criminal Law, Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri thundered from his web site: “Instead of prosecuting or persecuting, our country should be supporting our intelligence professionals who work to keep us safe.”

 

Senator Bond’s four-paragraph statement made no mention of who would keep us safe from our intelligence professionals.

Let’s just say that when looking for an answer to that question, the present Republican Party doesn’t immediately spring to mind.

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GOP’s Great Ex-Specterations

 

 

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter switched from being a Republican to being a Democrat around noon on Tuesday. This action made him (check one):

 

            ___ A crass opportunist whose polls told him he was going to get creamed in the 2010 Republican primary election.

            ___A principled advocate and leader, a1980 Reagan Republican who signed up for the Grand Old Party and couldn’t watch it become the Gotterdammerung Old Party.

            ___One more nail in the Republican Party’s clever plan to crucify itself in the hopes that it will arise from the dead.

            ___Some parts of all of the above.

 

Specter’s own statement puts it this way:

 

“Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”

 

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, presumably after clearing it with Rush Limbaugh, put it differently:

 

“Let's be honest-Senator Specter didn't leave the GOP based on principles of any kind. He left to further his personal political interests because he knew that he was going to lose a Republican primary due to his left-wing voting record.”

 

A politician of any sort beginning a sentence with “Let’s be honest” obviously admits that this is an unusual action worthy of special notice, so it’s worth a quick visit to the web site of Americans for Democratic Action, whose spring newsletter rates members of Congress according to how much their votes agree with the ADA’s ultra-liberal positions. Specter agreed with the ADA 45 percent of the time.

 

So he didn’t even vote “left wing” a majority of the time. Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon did, coming up with a 60 percent rating. And Republican Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine found common cause with the ADA respectively 75 and 80 percent of the time. (The last three senators should give any invitations for an RNC-sponsored quail hunt with Dick Cheney very careful scrutiny.)

 

Specter’s decision to join the Democrats puts them one vote short of the 60 needed under Senate rules to end filibusters, the GOP’s one-size-fits-all response to any 21^st century issue. Vote number 60 depends on Minnesota finally deciding whether Democrat Al Franken or Republican Norm Coleman won the election, a choice now with the Minnesota Supreme Court and almost certainly heading to a federal court after that.

 

Now we all know aboutletting Republicans win in the courts what they lost in the polls, but it’s the positions of the arch-conservatives who have hijacked the Republican party that are giving everyone from Senators to seniors pause.

 

Ronald Reagan was a giant of a man and his Big Tent Republican Party had enough room for diverse views. Arlen Specter’s switch today highlights that the Big Tent has become a holding corral for a huge herd of WAT (We’re Against That), producing little but political dung and unaware that the only exit is the slaughterhouse of the 2010 elections.

 

Or, as South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, he of the just-15 percent ADA rating, was quoted Tuesday in Politico, “As Republicans, we got a problem.”

 

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