Big Truba fa Duba?
Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R) of California must be a pretty popular guy today at the White House. You can see the fun time Scott McClellan had today parrying questions from reporters about what it meant that the Chairman called the president’s plan a “dead horse.”
As a sign of how well it went, you can start with McClellan’s out-of-the-box response: “Which proposal are you referring to, John?”
And it pretty much went down hill from there.
Not only did Thomas manage to utter what everyone has been thinking of late: that the president’s proposal isn’t doing very well and even a modern-day Diogenes would probably be hard pressed to find more than a few Hill Republicans who actually want, in their heart of hearts, the president to keep pushing this issue. In addition to that he managed to float a bunch of new winning ideas that Democrats can now attach to a senior member of the House GOP leadership. Great ideas like upping the retirement age for women since they don’t die as soon as men — an idea whose underlying premise can be rattled off in any number of ridiculous directions, as our friend Ed Kilgore demonstrates to his obvious delight.
In any case, with all the fun today, it took us a while to realize that Thomas had really given us no choice but to place him in the Conscience Caucus.
He’s really not our prototypical member, mind you. And, at least from what I hear, with so much ego packed in that body, it’s hard to know where to fit a conscience, let alone vital organs, imagination, a soul, carbon, water and whatever the other stuff is that most of us have within us as we shuffle around this mortal coil.
He’s not saying he’s against a phase-out, that he won’t vote for it or that he’s afraid of it. But whether we like it or not, when you say the president’s phase-out plan is “DOA”, you’re Caucus-bound.
No two ways about it.
