This little gem from McConnel got my blood boiling:
Helping the country get through the Great Recession is not your top priority. Your single most important goal is getting a Republican ass into the oval office seat.
This makes it plain what I have suspected all along. The Republicans have no intention to act towards responsible governance. Like a virus, whose only goal is to replicate itself, the GOP’s only goal is to make more Republican office holders.
But that’s not what depresses me. What depresses me is that people are actually voting for them. That the GOP, in its current incarnation, is able to attract enough voters to take over the House of Representatives. That they’re able to channel voter anger that the government hasn’t done anything for them, when for the past two years they’ve been cynically obstructing legislation in Congress so that they could say in 2010: “See? Government is broken!” How do people fall for this shit? Are people not paying any fucking attention?
Pitting Mitch McConnell (or John Boehner, his equivalent in the House) is like shooting the broad side of a barn with a rifle that hits even when it misses. There’s just no sport in it anymore.
But overall, I agree with you. These two (and their henchmen Tom Coburn and Eric Cantor) are more interested in being the right kind of Republican than in doing anything useful for their constituents or for their country.
How dare you paint all Republicans with such a broad brush just because some obscure officeholder said something stupid! It’s not like this guy is a national Republican leader or anything. I read about a liberal on a blog the other day who said George Bush is a traitor, and that’s exactly the same thing!
What? He’s next in line for Senate Majority Leader if Angle gets her wish? Never mind.
As much as McConnell is unquestionably a twit, I can sort of give a pass on this. One assumes he feels a Republican president would ultimately be better for the country, therefore getting such a person elected post haste would be good for all.
It’s understandable that a Republican wants a Republican President. What becomes a problem is when they are constantly in campaign mode, and they completely forget that they are elected office holders whose job is to help govern the country as part of a coequal branch of the government. I deeply fear another government shutdown and frivolous “investigations” of Obama are going to be part of their strategy for their number one priority.
I don’t know, this sounds like the ends don’t justify the means. Where did you get that idea from? Next, you’ll be telling me that two wrongs don’t make a right.
Correct. He could have said, “Repealing the health care disaster,” or “Ensuring that textualist judges are appointed to the federal bench,” or “Pushing for federal tort reform.” But as important as each of those jobs are, none of the them is reachable when the guy in the White House will veto the measures that implement them. (Or in the case of judges, simply select such judges for appointment in the first place). So it stands to reason that the most important goal is getting Obama out.
The OP’s objections are misplaced. Obviously, the OP favors things like universal health care, judges who believe in “living Constitutions,” and so forth; equally obviously, the OP regards efforts to block those things as bad for the country.
That’s a defensible view, but surely the OP can acknowledge that someone may hold opposite views and still be in favor of responsible governance.
Or does the OP believe that, simply by definition, his political goals are the only responsible ones? If so, then why even provide the details? The man’s a Republican; of COURSE he’s for irresponsible government!
Is it of no note to you that McConnell says nothing at all of the sort about policy goals for his own party, merely the need to obstruct the Democrats and expel them from office? :dubious:
If this were a presidential election season, that would be one thing. But is doing nothing but sitting back for over 2 years and letting our problems get worse rather than finding ways to solve them by cooperating with the President really better for the country?
This is the problem with the GOP mindset, because guess what Obama was elected President and they act as if he is some osrt of usurper and his policies are not democratically based.
I suspect that it’s not just a question of letting things get worse: McConnell wants things to get worse, so that the GOP can blame Obama for things getting worse.
Palin wins the WH in 2012. She moves forward on just the agenda you expect.
In 2014, I turn to you and say that the single most important thing I want to achieve is for Sarah Palin to be a one-term president.
You’d say the same thing? Or you would clearly understand that by extension, I mean getting someone whose policies and intentions are much more likely to be closer to mine than her’s are.
With so much other political claptrap out there, this was a bad choice.
Of course Obama was elected president. What does that claim even mean? They are not denying he was elected president. They are saying that subsequent to his election as president, he pushed into law initiatives that were not popular. Now he’s using the fact of those unpopular initiatives to erode Obama’s support, so that Obama won’t be able to enact further policies.
His policies are as democratically based as any other president’s. But part of our democratic republic is that every two years, we elect a third of the Senate and the whole House. That, too, is “democratically based.” So McConnell is saying, in effect, that by electing Republicans, Obama’s influence will be blunted, and the stage will be set for 2012 and Obama’s defeat when he seeks re-election.
Doesn’t the answer to that depend on the particular policy in question? For example, if you’re convinced that the health care reforms are not good for the country, then stalling for two years and doing nothing is much better than passing some compromise bill that furthers the bad plan.
There’s obviously some logic to what you’re saying, but the key point (as a few others have made) is that there won’t be a presidential election for 2 years. Therefore there will be a democrat (presumably Obama, conceivably Biden) in the White House for two years. So when McConnell goes into work in the morning, if his absolute top priority today is winning an election for his party in two years, what does that imply about his ability and desire to actually help address the issues that we as a nation are facing today and will be facing for the next two years?
To think about it another way, there’s a commonly held cynical view among liberals that the Republican party’s plan of action for the past two years has been “stop the democrats from accomplishing ANYTHING, then blame them that things haven’t gotten better”. Now, it’s obviously hard to really prove whether or not something like that is true, but McConnell’s quote certainly fits nicely into that narrative.
IMO, Washington can either be in campaign mode or governance mode. But nowadays we’re stuck in the Permanent Campaign, so we’re never in governance mode. Everything is designed to influence the next election no matter how far off it is and how much we need our leaders to lead in the meantime.
But if we’re lost and trying to get to Schenectady, and you think we should go west and I think we should southwest, we might reach a compromise of west-southwest, each believing we weren’t headed directly towards our goal but both sure we were at least getting closer.
But if I believe we should be heading east, then all bets are off. I am convinced that every step you take your way moves us farther away, and you believe the same of my plan. Under those circumstances, it makes a bit more sense to contemplate a standstill.
Of course, the people have spoken in electing Obama. But more recently (assuming a fait accompli) the people have spoken in electing a whole bunch of Republicans. So that argument seems to be a wash.
