“They say, ‘Peace, Peace,’ but there is no peace.”
That’s Jeremiah 6:14, for all you secular-humanist-non-Torah / Bible-reading TPM readers. But that verse came to Talking Points’ mind today when he was listening to a dozen members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) vainly trying to mouth some protest to the deeply wrong outcome of the November election.
Did you see Bob Filner there?
In case you’re wondering, Filner (who Talking Points sorta knows) was the white guy who spontaneously popped up in the middle of the whole thing to offer his “solidarity” to his CBC colleagues. I guess the whole sixties liberal thing just got the better of him for a moment. But God bless ’em!
As the cynical alter-ego of a Washington journalist (who is himself pretty damn cynical), Talking Points doesn’t like to get mawkish and sentimental about public events. But he has to admit he was very moved by the goings-on on the House floor today. And he also felt quietly ashamed on behalf of the fifty Senate Democrats, not one of whom could bring themselves to sign on to force a brief debate on the legitimacy of Florida’s twenty-five Bush electors.
As a political matter, not letting any debate get started was almost certainly the right thing to do. But watching the whole thing unfold made it clear that sometimes – pretty infrequently in Talking Points’ opinion – but sometimes the politically wise thing just ain’t the right thing to do.
Okay, no more mawkishness and sentimentality! Back to the snarky, cynical stuff … I hear Paul Wellstone was the one Senator they almost flipped. I’ll see what I can find out about this and report back soon.
P.S. As I said in this earlier post, the big loser today was obvious. It was John Ashcroft.
