yesthattom (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yesthattom) wrote2003-12-11 06:31 pm
yesthattom) wrote2003-12-11 06:31 pm
(no subject)
Go Nancy!
Full Article Here
... Some of the Democrats who voted to authorize the Iraq war in October 2002 did so -- or say they did so -- in hopes of prodding Bush to embrace a more multilateral approach toward Iraq.
Call this the Tony Blair Fallacy -- both the prime minister and our own legislators failed to realize that Bush wanted only their permission, not their advice. And this year it was Ted Kennedy -- long the wisest liberal head on the Hill -- who calculated that the Medicare bill would grow more palatable the longer it was deliberated. In any previous Congress, that could well have been the case. In this Congress, however, no Democrats are allowed into the deliberations that matter.
Today the Democrats finally have a legislative leader -- San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi, who heads the party in the House -- who understands that dealmaking with the likes of Tom DeLay is a chimera, and that the business of the Democrats is to oppose. The overwhelming vote of House Democrats against the Medicare bill is testimony to her success. Her tenure casts a cold light on that of her predecessor, Dick Gephardt, who, in his eight years as minority leader, never assembled a united opposition to the malignant follies of Gingrich and DeLay.
While the nation's Democratic leaders were unable to understand just how marginal they'd become, however, millions of rank-and-file Democrats and just plain disgruntled Bush-haters intuitively grasped what was going on. Bush was bent on repealing the New Deal and replacing the internationalist order that the United States had erected after World War II with a more nationalist vision of his own. If you weren't with him, you were against him. And he was against you.
Full Article Here
... Some of the Democrats who voted to authorize the Iraq war in October 2002 did so -- or say they did so -- in hopes of prodding Bush to embrace a more multilateral approach toward Iraq.
Call this the Tony Blair Fallacy -- both the prime minister and our own legislators failed to realize that Bush wanted only their permission, not their advice. And this year it was Ted Kennedy -- long the wisest liberal head on the Hill -- who calculated that the Medicare bill would grow more palatable the longer it was deliberated. In any previous Congress, that could well have been the case. In this Congress, however, no Democrats are allowed into the deliberations that matter.
Today the Democrats finally have a legislative leader -- San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi, who heads the party in the House -- who understands that dealmaking with the likes of Tom DeLay is a chimera, and that the business of the Democrats is to oppose. The overwhelming vote of House Democrats against the Medicare bill is testimony to her success. Her tenure casts a cold light on that of her predecessor, Dick Gephardt, who, in his eight years as minority leader, never assembled a united opposition to the malignant follies of Gingrich and DeLay.
While the nation's Democratic leaders were unable to understand just how marginal they'd become, however, millions of rank-and-file Democrats and just plain disgruntled Bush-haters intuitively grasped what was going on. Bush was bent on repealing the New Deal and replacing the internationalist order that the United States had erected after World War II with a more nationalist vision of his own. If you weren't with him, you were against him. And he was against you.
Kennedy?!
Has he really changed that much? I know he's not the embarassment he was in the late '70s and most of the '80s* -- stopping the booze has clearly been good for him. I don't pay nearly as much attention as I used to. So if you tell me he (even if it really is someone on his top-notch staff acting through him) is now unusally wise, I'll have to take your claim seriously. But all I've noticed is that he's become farily adept at using his celebrity status for good ends.
* One great speech (that he didn't write) delivered at the 1980 convention doesn't excuse a decade of claiming the mantle of 'Mr. Liberal' without the showing the faintest clue of the moral reasons behind moral liberalism. No one, not Reagan, not Buckley, not Rupert Murdoch, Newt Gingrich, nor anyone else, has done more to give the impression that liberalism is nothing more than a collection of greedy special interests. Because to Kennedy, that's all it was. He was happy to serve as the spokesman for those interests, but at least in those days he was intellectually and morally a carpetbagger serving a constituency for which he had no affinity.
Re: Kennedy?!
Obvioiusly you mean "everything I quoted", since the only part I wrote was "Go Nancy!"
Re: Kennedy?!
A different, local view of Ms. Pelosi