The conventional wisdom was that if the Dems did get Health Care Reform through, that would be it. The solid phalanx of No would clamp down even harder. But it’s not looking that way. Sen. Dodd (D-CT) says that post-Health Care a number of his Republican colleagues have had enough.
“The health care thing kind of changed the atmospherics around here,” Dodd told reporters today. “I think, frankly, there are a number of Republicans who went along with the strategy of ‘just say no’ who were never really happy with it, but if it worked they would go along. They saw it fail. And now they’ve had enough of it. and they really want to be involved in crafting things.”
I’m not sure John Boehner making a generic statement that violence, threats and vandalism aren’t legitimate parts of the Health Care Reform debate really cuts it. Especially when his own congressional campaign committee is actively downplaying the importance of violent incidents and even blaming them on the victims.
Thankfully, no one has been injured or killed. But this didn’t come from nowhere and it can’t be pawned off on a few cranks. Everything that’s happened over the last five days has grown from a pattern of incitement going back almost a year — wildly hyperbolic statements, coded appeals to menacing behavior, flippant jokes about bringing firearms to political events and all the rest. Now Eric Cantor (R-VA) is going on the attack, claiming that who’s really to blame here is the Democrats for making a big deal about these acts of violence against them.
No one who is even remotely honest can pretend that anything about this is bipartisan in character. The Right and yes the national Republican party has been stirring this pot for months. We all see this. Cantor’s behavior is shameful beyond imagining. It’s time for a truth moment for the national Republican party. Incitement matters. They have to take responsibility for what they’ve done: which is nothing less than a campaign of incitement for which they’re now unwilling to take any responsibility.
More Democrats like Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), please. Watch.
The Senate is now voting on the reconciliation bill on health care reform. Final vote tally shortly …
I don’t want to make light of any act of violence or threatened violence against a public official, but there was something about Minority Whip Eric Cantor’s claim this morning that his campaign office in downtown Richmond had been shot at that seemed off. First, there were no local news reports of the incident, which he said happened this week. Second, the first news report of any kind about the incident seems to have been a Foxnews.com “exclusive” published just before Cantor spoke. Third, the timing of Cantor’s revelation seemed curious given what a plastering Republicans have been getting over the last 24 hours for their role in inciting isolated acts of vandalism and threats against Democrats.
As I say, this is not the sort of thing to be taken lightly or mocked, but take a look at the press release we just got in from the Richmond Police Department about this incident (the italics are mine): Read More
I came down with some kind of bug today. So from a bit after Eric Cantor gave his press conference this morning until a short time ago I was pretty much out of commission. So I read David’s post below about the alleged attack on Cantor’s office fresh, not knowing any of the reporting the team had done on the story. And I’m a bit surprised — or maybe not so surprised — that Cantor can even walk down the halls of Congress now without friends and associates snickering at him for making such a fool out of himself. Putting together Cantor’s statements to the press and the police report about the incident, Cantor’s claim seems to be that he was attacked by one of those Renaissance military engineers from Italy who first discovered the parabolic ballistic equations that allowed you to shoot artillery nearly straight up in the air and have it hit your enemy on the way back down. Read More
The conservative American Enterprise Institute parts ways with David Frum after seven years — and just four days after he called the passage of health care reform the GOP’s “Waterloo.”
It wasn’t quite as bad as showing up this morning with a backwards B scraped on his cheek. But even so, it doesn’t look like anybody’s buying Eric Cantor’s nonsense. Even the AP is coming about as close as their stylebook will allow them to come to calling him on his nonsense about the bogus attack he tried to float in this morning’s press conference.
From the AP report …
“A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week, and I’ve received threatening e-mails,” Cantor said. He refused to release details, however, saying it would only encourage more threats, and refused to take questions.
Later Thursday, however, Richmond police said in a news release that the bullet had been fired into the air around 1 a.m. Tuesday. It finished its random arc back to earth at a sharp downward trajectory, breaking a window pane on the bottom floor of the two-story brick building where Cantor’s campaign leases the top floor.