Quite right. Maybe if more Democratic politicians and voters kept in mind what’s at stake here, rather than indulge the urge to pontificate about how fucking sainted they are and how they would never debase themselves in such a tawdry way and how their innocence is lost because somebody LIED about his sex life . . . perhaps we might have a more effective party.
Maybe we should let all the hippie-dippy, pie-in-the-sky, high-minded types go around calling themselves liberals, or progressives, or whatever the fuck it is they want to be called these days. And leave the word Democrat to people who actually have the stomach for politics and getting things done.
Not a Democrat, too radical and too honest about it. Pretty much always vote that way, best I can do. Its a citizens duty to choose, however ewwwww-some that choice may be.
But speaking as a hippy-dippy progressive, I trust you will permit me and mine to offer our votes, and those of our friends and neighbors we might convince, to the candidate with the D? In return, I promise that when the blue-dead-dog, corporatist, Clintonista, menshevik, three-legged git of a Dem Party bends over and lubes itself for a jolly good rogering with the Pubbie pork sword…
Several of us will remain politely quiet. The rest of us will scream our heads off, per usual. Think of it as a compromise.
Really now. Yes it’s true each of those people resigned.
In order to demonstrate Republicans forced out their own you might want to provide a list of republicans that demanded those resignations. To my knowledge each of them resigned without leadership demands if they’d chosen to stay I’d expect the Republican party would suck it up and stand by their side because that’s what they do. The Democrats eat their own if they are looking weak.
Well, yeah, I can clearly see how Weiner and Mark Foley are pretty much exactly the same. Like when Julia Child recommended a nice chianti when eating liver, that made her pretty much the same as Hannibal Lecter. Clear as a bell,
boytyperanma, you can do your own homework. Those are four Republicans that resigned under pressure from their own party. Politicians generally aren’t pussies. If they could have stayed, I think they would have fought it out.
I’m pretty middle of the road, but I’ve generally felt that Republicans are better than Dems for focring out their scumbags, from Nixon forward. Senator Vitter and Senator Wide Stance being two exceptions which pissed me off.
What pressure are you talking about? Do you have any examples of that pressure or are you just given them credit where none is due.
I googled looking for Republican congresscritters that called for those resignations prior to them occurring and struck out maybe since you are the one making the claim you’ll put more effort into it than I did and prove me wrong.
I still think it would serve the Democrats (of which I are one) better in the ensuing months to be emphatically repeating “Ryan and the pubbies want to kill Medicare” and not “Weiner may be icky, but he’s not as icky as Vitter” even if I personally do not give a shit if sent a picture of his penis to everyone on twitter. It’s a big distraction from what’s important and he was stupid. Do you guys still think he’s going to do the dems GOOD?
To be ruthlessly fair, that would only be true if the pressure was public. I don’t doubt for a second there was powerful pressure from the Pubbie colleagues, but nobody wanted to talk about it publicly for fear of associating oneself with ick.
Well as a liberal, progressive type – Obama is waaaay to the right of me – I shall have to beg to differ as to how the ones who are backstabbing Weiner should be characterized. Most of them seem to be the standard Democratic pols: Pelosi, Reed, etc., hardly the hippy dippy lefty wing of the party, if such even exists.
True. By that phrase “hippie-dippy &c. &c.,” I mean to refer to those liberal milquetoasts who are so eager to assure us that they are beholden to no party and that they would never compromise their principles and refrain from calling for a Democrat to resign when GOP asks them to. Perhaps “goddamn independents” (the poli sci term for good-for-nothing opportunists) would have been more appropriate.
spifflog is making an equivalency argument claiming that the Republicans treat their own the same as Democrats are treating Wiener.
Democrats are calling publicly calling for Wieners resignation. If Republicans do indeed treat their own the same we should have had Republicans publicly calling for the resignation of each Rep. Mark Foley, Rep. Mark Souder, Rep. Chris Lee and
Rep. Bob Livingston.
Per the news last night, Vitter was honored at a $2500/person fundraiser recently (last night, night before, something like that) and apparently no national-level Republican ever called for his resignation. Furthermore, he took over Livingston’s seat, and on a “family values”/‘gay marriage debases real marriage’s sanctity’ platform. I guess paying prostitutes for sex is A-OK in God’s eyes, but those gay folks getting married is just awful!
I’m sorry, the response to Weiner sending naughty pics should be pointing over at Vitter and changing the subject. Naughty pics are a stupid idea (not to mention douchey), and if he didn’t have an agreement with his wife about a certain amount of latitude in the marriage then he’s almost certainly broken her heart, or at least exposed her to major public humiliation, and that’s an asshole move. But he didn’t break any laws (that we know of) and actually screw a prostitute - or anyone else, that we know of. So he should have that going for him. Apparently not going the whole way when doing adultery-related things is the worse offense?
Maybe he should have pulled out the “I’ve asked forgiveness from God” tearful press conference after a statement and period of seclusion like Vitter did, and everyone would soon think he’s worth big fundraising dinners too.
If I was a Dem (I’m an independent that swings both ways, errr, ummm, anyway), why wouldn’t you want Wiener to go? By all accounts he’s immature (certainly acts like it) and hard to work with. He’s giving himself and by some very small measure his party a black eye. If he leaves, a Democratic governor will schedule a new election in that very Democratic district. Either way, it seems like that seat will be lost to New York anyway in the future. So they don’t lose anything, but show that they won’t tolerate this type of terrible behavior.
I don’t care about Weiner one way or another (heh), but I think it’s effing hilarious to see the howling when the shoe’s on the other foot. Sort of like I didn’t really care for Grayson’s overblown rhetoric, but laughed like hell when Republicans took exception to what they themselves do as a matter of course.
I don’t particularly like Vitter as a person, but political comparisons to him don’t seem particularly on point. He is from Louisiana - and voters of both parties there seem to tolerate politicians that have colorful personalities or behavioral quirks.