Hey Shrub: if you want the Dems to put aside partisanship - YOU GO FIRST. OK?

The BBQ Pit
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Little Shrubbery is upset about the state of the economy. “My message to Congress is: Get to work and get something done,” because he wants a stimulus package “to my desk before the end of the month.”

OK, so far. Now the fun part: Bush says it’s time “to put aside political differences and act swiftly and strongly.”

And, Kid Twit, you’re going to do your part in this how? By insisting that your ‘stimulus’ bill, which is really just another wet kiss for rich people and for corporate America, is the ‘middle ground’ around which everyone should rally.

Yeah, suuuuuure, Mr. Little Boy President, like you’re not being partisan at all. And how much of the Democratic proposal to aid the unemployed are you willing to go along with? Apparently none, according to your press secretary. He says the President and Congress have an agreement on a spending cap, and Boy George expects it to be honored.

Ever thought of considering what’s good for the people, Mr. Scalia’s Choice? Does this agreement need to be kept, given the special circumstances, or would it be better for the working people of this country - especially those who were working, a few months ago, but aren’t anymore - if we spent a little money to augment our minimal system of unemployment benefits, rather than cutting the taxes of those who have money to spare?

Nah. The Dems, I guess, weren’t able to get an agreement from you that the $1.3 trillion would be all the taxes cut, so they’re expected to cut more taxes for Your People. But you’re not going to compromise, nosir.

Your ‘putting aside political differences’ means “I’m the President - do what I say, even if you’re a Democrat.”

Look, buster: due to a series of flukes on top of flukes, you’re in the White House, despite the fact that most of us didn’t vote for you. We didn’t vote for your economic program. I understand that you still want to cut taxes for rich people, without spending anything on Joe and Jane Sixpack if you can help it.

But if you’re gonna call that “bipartisanship”, then kindly go give Tom DeLay’s horse a rim-job, OK, because that’s a more honest activity than what you’re practicing.

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Yup. Every “rich person” in the U.S is a Republican and therefore a member of the group you have defined as “Your People.”

Tell me if I’m misremembering the election but “most of us” didn’t vote for any single candidate. Repeat this until it sticks—there was no majority.

This, “My message to Congress is: Get to work and get something done,” is appalling, I agree. I’d rather Congress did nothing.

And it appears in your fit of pique you missed these two statements of bipartisianship in your linked article.

and

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I’ve tried to get my own Economical Stimulation package passed, but nobody seems to be willing to cross the aisle. You’d think that subsidized porn, low cost hand lotion, and community block grants for the purchase of Real Dolls[sup]TM[/sup] and Boy Toys[sup]TM[/sup] would be popular with Midwestern swing voters, but apparently my colleagues aren’t willing to but partisanship aside and help bring the nation together in this time of turmoil.

It takes a village to maintain an erection.

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Please point out where I said that, Unc. You’re a decent fellow, but you have the damnedest tendency to read in more into my words than is there.

There certainly wasn’t any sort of Bush mandate, then.

And if we put the political preferences of the voters together to get a majority, in any way that makes sense, the only intelligible majority you get is a center-left majority of Gore and Nader voters. Clearly not a Bush mandate.

Can we take that all the way back to January 21? They’ve already done a decade’s worth of damage.

Well, that one certainly backs up my point. Although I’d say the anti-terrorism bill sneak-attack by the Administration wasn’t exactly a great display of reaching across party lines.

Sounds as if Daschle was responding to the meeting, not Shrubbery’s later remarks. I wouldn’t be surprised if Daschle kinda got sandbagged, here.

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Okay, we’ve had six weeks-plus of Rallying Around our Jerkoff President in Times of Peril and not saying mean things about him. Thank you, RTFirefly, for throwing down the first glove.

Let me just get my notes together about how his handlers have spent the past six weeks quietly undoing even the pathetically small amount of good work Clinton did on environmental matters (whee! I kin ride muh SNOWMOBILE over da OTTERS in YOSEMITE again!), and I’ll be back with you tomorrow.

By the way, I understood “most of us didn’t vote for you” as a reference to the fact that Bush lost the popular vote. What the hell was Unc talking about?

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I think the OP makes a number of good points. Unfortunately, he loses some perception points - with me, anyway - by resorting to the “Shrub” business. Of course, this is the Pit, where ranting without logic is permissible. It’s a shame to let these otherwise valid and intriguing debate points get squandered here.

Although I supported Bush in the election, and I feel that a President must govern, rather than do little or nothing in response to a squeaky-thin electoral vote-only victory… I think the “get to work, Congress” tone is highly inappropriate. And I think any President ought to consider the value of working with the opposition party as opposed to steamrolling legislation through.

Bush and his team don’t ever seem to have embraced that philosophy, and it’s a shame.

And as to this:

Is this the same bill that passed the Senate 98-1?

  • Rick
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Ooh! Can Interior Boy jump in?!?!

A federal judge threatened Tuesday to hold Interior Secretary Gale Norton in contempt, saying her initial action over billions of dollars her department holds for American Indians was “so clearly contemptuous” he doubted she could be defended.

Fucking the Indians, and

“When I asked her if she would uphold the Bureau of Land Management’s important decision to deny a permit to a gold mine which everyone agrees would destroy Native American land . . . she basically passed on an answer.”

Fucking the Indians again, and

Environmental groups, however, noted that Norton ignored other scientific data, relied on a report paid for by an oil company and offered her own conclusions about the Porcupine caribou herd in order to give her answers a pro-drilling slant. But Norton yesterday said she was justified in consulting other points of view before she provided her formal response to the committee.

Lying, and fucking the caribou, and…

…Oh, fuck it. Nobody gives a damn anymore.

Mark my words: when American Indians are happy again, so shall be the world.

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Lord knows I’m not exactly the biggest Bush supporter in the world (I’m not a Gore supporter either. I’d rather have someone generally clueless than someone convinced that he’s RIGHT) but I understand what he’s doing here.

He’s controlling the discussion.

The discussion, as managed, is about how large the stimulus package should be not about whether there should be one.

It’s a tactic old as the hills (I’ve used it in corporate warfare many’s the time…don’t hold it against me) and if you can pull it off it’s great.

That’s all that’s happening here. Partisanship never went away. And won’t (this is Washington, after all). It’s just coming out in the open again.

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Here is a link that explains the Stimulus Package in more detail:
Stimulus
It is an, um, interesting bit of legislation. To say the least.

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That’s just it…the thing that is so wretchedly dreadful about Dubya is that he’s BOTH!!! :eek:

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Sofa - yeah, using the current crisis as yet one more trumped-up excuse to drill the Arctic Wildlife Refuge is just one more bit of demashrubbery.

But the business with the Indian trust funds is, unfortunately, truly bipartisan, and has been going on for many decades now.

Rick - I thought about starting this in GD, but I realized I really wanted to call names, hurl invective, and so forth. So I started it off here.

Nothing wrong with debating the genuine points of debate, even in the Pit, of course.

The vote on the “Patriotism is the Last Refuge of an Ashcroft” antiterrorism bill is hardly indicative of bipartisanship. The House committee had, after careful consideration, passed a reasonably good measure. Then Ashcroft came along, said “Nope, not good enough,” and the next thing, the committee’s voting on Ashcroft’s substitute without having had time to read it. And given the speed with which it was shoved through, I doubt that too many Congresspersons on either side did, either. Not to mention, this was tinged with the “we’ve got to support the President in the war against terrorism” business, and that seemed to preclude sensible discussion/opposition.

Nate - of course he’s trying to control the discussion. And he’s doing it by trying to have it both ways: by saying to Congress, “Just get to work and get me a stimulus package, of any reasonable nature” while his press sec says, “just so long as it has tax cuts, but not spending.”

As the Washington Post this morning says, Bush’s proposed stimulus package is worse than nothing at all. They may be biased, but they’ve got some very good arguments.

And of course he’s using the current crisis to press a nakedly partisan agenda, which may serve him well at the moment, but is frankly evil, IMO. Later on he may really need the parties to put aside partisanship on behalf of the genuine crisis, only by then his credibility will be shot.

Yeah, Bush is doing a good job in turning September 11 into a handy excuse to shove anything he can through Congress. (He hasn’t yet seen the question for which the answer isn’t “cut taxes for the rich”.) Yeah, that’s “managing the discussion.”

It’s also called “helping out your friends at the country’s expense.” That’s politics as usual, of course, but it’s still wrong even in normal times. (And gee, didn’t this President run on the idea of getting away from that? Fucking liar.) And there’s something particularly smelly, IMHO, about using September 11 as a means of escalating that sort of politics.

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Frankly, I’m not surprised that the current crisis is being managed for partisan reasons (on both sides, I admit). This is what politicians do, after all.

And of course Bush is using the White House to help his backers (not friends necessarily, they don’t all fit both words). They paid for the White House…they should get the use of it.

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At least under Clinton that mostly meant they just got to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. :rolleyes:

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Oh, it meant FAR more than that.

The Lincoln bedroom was just the loss leader in the marketing plan.

I’ll say it again…both sides are corrupt. The stakes are so high (control of 2 TRILLION dollars annually) that any behavior is justified.

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Yeah, absolutely. All Clinton gave his financial supporters was a night in the Lincoln bedroom and a hearty “Fuck you! I’m voting Republican!”

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A few things:

  1. The size of the budget isn’t exactly indicative of what the stakes are with respect to the budget; it’s how much potential change there is in the way that money’s spent.

As long as Social Security ‘reform’ (no opinion, but lots of doubts) is bogged down behind more pressing events, then that huge chunk of change isn’t up for grabs. Ditto Medicare. The ‘discretionary’ budget is limited to $686B, according to Fleischer, and even a lot of that really isn’t very discretionary.

Yes, that still leaves some big money, but bigger money by far is in tax and regulatory (in the larger sense) changes. That is where the lobbyists earn their Rolexes. A decision to drill in the ANWR won’t cost us taxpayers a penny in budgetary terms, but there’s likely a lot of money to be made if the Senate votes to OK drilling. And so the lobbyists will give money to campaign war chests.

  1. The campaign contributions are where the money and the politicians intersect, for the most part. You can have a great message, but if you don’t have the money to get that message out to the people, your opponent can tell the world who you are - and in that case, you might as well stay home.

  2. It’s not true that both parties are corrupted by the political money. Really, only one party is: the Democrats.

For the most part, political money just gives Republicans more impetus to do what they’d want to do anyway, once we’re away from stuff like the flag, and school prayer: make things easier on corporations and rich people. So in a way, the money makes them more pure.

There are some exceptions to this - there are still some centrist Republicans - but on the whole, it’s so, and it’s old news. (I think I’ve got a yellowed clipping of a column from 10-12 years back that makes exactly this point.)

But the Democrats, who really have no reason to exist unless they’re going to put some brake on the power of big money and its effect on the lives of everyday people - they are corrupted. They have to accept enough contributions to be able to get their message out, and if they turn a deaf ear to the people handing out the money, then they don’t get any. And in the end, if they don’t vote in a way that makes lobbyists happy, the money dries up. So it winds up changing their message.

L) The Lincoln Bedroom was, for the Clinton Administration, a way around this, to a limited extent. In return for the big contributions, donors got a direct, feel-good payoff: a night in the most exclusive hotel in town. By having something to sell other than its influence on legislation and regulation, Clinton didn’t have to sell so much of that product.

Not that Clinton was exactly pure to begin with, of course - but clearly a great deal more of his sympathies were with Joe and Jane Sixpack than is true of Bush, whose ‘compassionate conservatism’ (remember that? heh-heh) seems to mostly apply to people in the top tax brackets.

[sub]Yeah, I know - this is getting most un-Pit like. Quick, somebody flame me![/sub]

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Would that this were so. Unfortunately, it’s not (or is to a very limited extent).

There are many people who do give money to campaigns for ideological reasons, and in these instances neither party is being corrupted. But I assume you are referring to people/businesses who give money looking for favors - I assume your point is that the Republicans are pro-business anyway, while the Democrats are anti (or represent other, competing interests).

But the fact is that very few of these people are spending their hard-earned money so that “business” in general should benefit. Most of these people have specific and narrowly defined agendas that they want. They want obscure amendments that benefit them added to bills, they want letters and introductions to powerful beaurocrats, they want waivers of regulations for themselves etc. etc. There’s no one who “naturally” supports these (although hometown elected officials tend to support major employers in their area). The Democrats and Republicans are equally corrupted by these.

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Your implication is quite clear. You’ve said that Bush’s latest stimulus package is “just another wet kiss for rich people and for corporate America.” Another implies there was a first. Which you made clear to whom you believe it was delivered using this fragment, “so they’re expected to cut more taxes for Your People.”

Please point out where I said that, RTF. You’re a decent fellow, but you have the damnedest tendency to read in more into my words than is there. Whoops! I think I heard someone else just make that exact statment. Wonder who that was.

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Ok…um, you suck!

No, no…how about…your mom’s dead!

Yeah, that had to hurt! Wooo!

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That is one of the funniest things I have ever read on the boards.