Check out Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) as she shamelessly pretends to be giving fellow Tennessean Al Gore a chance to “clear the air” while really impugning his integrity during today’s hearing on the Hill — a transparent effort that’s not lost on Gore.
Have you no sense of decency, ma’am?
Late Update: Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) tries, but he can’t top Blackburn for pure disingenuousness.
The Minnesota congresswoman takes to the floor of the House to claim that the TSA is going to start picking pro-life, pro-gun conservatives out of the security line at the airport for extra scrutiny.
Republican Jim Tedisco concedes to Democrat Scott Murphy in the razor-thin election in the NY-20. The concession came in a phone call from Tedisco to Murphy, Eric Kleefeld reports.
Murphy should send Al Franken flowers. The special election in New York was March 31, nearly five months after Franken’s win in November, yet Murphy will be seated first.
TPM Reader JS:
Let’s say that all of the sudden, due to the catastrophic onset of a once-in-a-generation crisis, it no longer becomes possible to deny that the elites at the head of a societally important institution have a record of rampant violation not just of the law, but of our most cherished American ideals. Do you:
A) acknowledge that the institution itself has failed in fundamental ways, name and prosecute the true bad apples to the fullest extent of the law, and overhaul the system in a way that essentially wipes out many of the vested interests that have kept it going; or
B) attempt to patch up the existing system by agreeing to keep up various now-discredited fictions and illusions in exchange for a few hard concessions from the elites, all in the hope that the whole monstrosity can limp along until the crisis has passed, at which point it can recover and all of the elites can go back to business as usual
Obama is, by nature, a consensus seeker with inhuman levels of ambition and talent, which means that on both torture and on Wall St. bankster criminality he instinctively reaches for B), which is the (impossible) option that attempts to please everybody at least a little. But what we really need is A), which would seem to someone like Obama to be the most dangerous option, necessitating as it does the social trauma of genuine collective soul searching. You’d have to be able to gamble that America can tolerate this kind of huge rupture — like the lancing of a boil — and come through it all intact, and Obama is not a gambler.
I’m still withholding judgment, but I can’t say this is an unreasonable reading of the evidence thus far.
Say this for him: he didn’t end up pulling a Coleman.
Went out with some dignity.
Right-wing extremist congresswoman denounces attacks on right-wing extremists.
No one who has followed Pat Buchanan over the years will be surprised by him using a questionable term like “scrub stock” to describe non-white foreigners. Well, no one outside of DC, at least. The real issue is why Buchanan’s jingoistic nativism has not disqualified him as a member of the elite punditry who gets to spend hours each week playing the cranky old uncle on MSNBC.
Late Update: TPM Reader TL takes exception:
Why does David Kurtz let Pat Buchanan off so easily? Labeling him as merely a “nativist” is tantamount to a slap on the wrist, and in light of the over-the-top, inflammatory innuendo in his article could even be perceived as a strange nod of agreement. …
Pat Buchanan … was born in 1938 and understands full well the meaning of “blood-and-soil” and “scrub stock.” His article is an endorsement — even embracing — of full blown Naziism, and the worst of Naziism (if there can be such a thing).
It’s not the “dip” into an “obscure racist phrase” (in TPM’s words) that is so disturbing — it’s the use of three phrases and the ideology behind them, tied together in one article, that rise to a level I’ve never witnessed in recent mainstream political discourse: “blood-and-soil,” “scrub stock,” and “(m)ost Americans remain visceral patriots. It’s in their DNA.”
This rises to a level that would likely, ironically, put Buchanan in prison in today’s more enlightened Germany, but might have earned him an officer’s commission in the SS in 1938, the year he was born.