It makes more sense when you realize that Duckster isn’t saying that Pelosi should be impeached…
-XT
What would head on the table refer to then?
I’m thinking he was using a bit of that rhetoric stuff there. But leaving the hyperbole aside I think he’s saying something along the lines of ‘she’d be fucked if it came out that she supported Bush’s policies concerning interrogation techniques’…at least she would be fucked with her own base.
I don’t really think impeachment would come into it though…there would be no basis to impeach her on this and I seriously doubt even the most rabid pro-Republican would think along those lines.
-XT
It does sound like someone reminding the Pubs that they have failed and been repudiated by the electorate, and that they now need to focus on learning to act responsibly. The lesson has not yet sunk in, unfortunately.
The new Gee, Oh Pee strategy is actually a familiar one - to find a prominent Dem to demonize. Since they can’t get away with doing it to Obama the way they did it to Clinton, Pelosi is now the Chosen One.
I’ll take this question on face value, that it just wasn’t yet another bash George Bush thread. (You guys won the election for God’s sake! Please govern, and quit bitch’n! Guys like me, true Independents, voted for your guy for the whole change thing. Right now your party is indistinguishable from Republicans, IMO)
Anyway, Bush did reach out when he first took over. He had the moniker, somewhat earned from what I remember that he was a “unite, not a divider” in Texas. Obviously that period didn’t last. We don’t know if it will last with Obama either. Clearly Pelosi and many Dems weren’t feeling all that inclusive either as they wrote the stimulus package without any input from the Republicans. And that allowed Republican leadership to paint the stimulus bill as a Democratic pork bill, and to a significant extent, correctly.
The Republicans weren’t willing to offer any input except more tax cuts for the very rich.
If being a Republican appointee makes him Republican, then surely being a Democrat appointee makes him a Democrat? It’s particularly relevant to this thread because it shows that Bush was bipartisan, and the Obama carried him over because he was the only Democrat in Bush’s cabinet.
Debate sure is fun when you don’t feel constrained by facts, isn’t it?
I presume you have some lock solid cite for that?
For example?
What input do you think they wanted to provide?
See elucidator’s post above.
If you think that, you’re not paying attention.
The Republicans don’t want to be included (with a few moderate exceptions). If they & the Democrats put out some bipartisan bill that saves the world, they figure this won’t make people think “Vote Republican!” but it does lose them any bitching rights if things go south. To them, it’s better to be as obstructionist and bitchy as possible and hope that things get worse so they can say “Toldja so! Toldja so!” and make that their next electoral theme.
I’m game to watch Obama try it if only for the honest effort but, in the end, it’s a fool’s errand because the GOP wants nothing to do with a bipartisan relationship.
One theory is that they know the recovery is not going to be complete by the next election season, no matter what, and we may still be deep in it. By letting any action be associated solely with the Democrats, they have the chance to portray what will still be the parlous state of the economy as being the Democrats’ fault exclusively, and if only they’d listened to us and done what we’d said, if only …
The electorate has such a short memory that it might be effective, too.
If they are thinking that they are (complete) idiots. No way will we still be having the same levels of problems with the economy by the next election cycle…not unless things go completely TU. We should be in recovery mode by this time next year I should think…and if the Dems get sole credit for that it will bode badly for the Republicans.
-XT
Show me something else they offered.
It is not that the recovery may not be complete, but that it will not be enough to solve the problem. we are still in deep shit and I am not convinced the bill will solve it. We still have foreclosures,credit card debt and swaps to deal with. It is just too damn big.
I’ll take that as a ‘no.’ Thanks.
Your turn, spifflog.
As already asked of you: What input do you think they wanted to provide?
Or just desperate. What else could they do, short of growing the fuck up, which does not appear to have been considered by more than a few of them?
It is apparent, in any case, that the GOP strategy is much more focused on their own return to power than on the broader national interest. That will only ensure an even longer, deeper visit to electoral Purgatory, sure, but there ya go.
If the economy starts to recover, the Republican plan is to say it was the tax cuts that did it, and that the tax cuts overcame the “pork.”
The thing is, the Republicans don’t have to fear their constutencies going over to Obama (especialy in the House). They’re worried about guarding themselves on he right, not the left. There is a significant part of their voting base who thinks that Obama is literally the Antichrist and that any attempt to work with him or compromise is literally consorting with Satan. This is a bloc that Republicans fear they can’t win without, and this is especially true in the House. As Tip O’Neil famously said, all politics is local, and House Republicans aren’t looking to please voters on a national level, or even on a state level. They need to placate only their own politically mononchrome districts. If they’re not right wing and obstructionist about it, somebody else will be.
And cartoonists shall show us the way.
The bottom line is that the Republicans with their self-serving voodoo economics have nothing to offer. They are willfully putting party above country and as such should be shunned.
When the Dems want to start foreign wars on transparently trumped-up grounds they’ll know where to find them though.