Post-election Democrats equal large mouth plus gelatinous spinal column
November 18, 2008
By Steve Klinger.
The new Democrats are promising to be just like the old – invertebrates with large oral cavities.
After the Nov. 4 election, with significant gains assured in both houses of Congress and a Democratic president for the first time in eight years, a number of senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, were giving off menacing smoke signals about what they intended to do with Joe Lieberman. Turncoat Joe, the Democrat cum Independent cum Republican who spent the spring and summer hobnobbing with John McCain and saying nasty things about Barack Obama, not only endorsed McCain but campaigned for him and even for downticket Republicans, all the while making his home in the Democratic caucus and continuing to chair the powerful Homeland Security committee. Joe even got the red-carpet treatment as a featured speaker at the Republican convention. He came within shouting distance of the nomination to be McCain’s vice president. How much more of a non-Democrat could one senator be?
Well, with the polling looking bleak, Joe started hedging his bets, and by election night he was all about unity and forgetting the past and let’s get behind our new leaders. Reid met with him last week and grumbled to the media, referring to feelings he couldn’t express publicly. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) had no such reservations and declared Lieberman should be stripped of his committee chair, but Evan Bayh (D-IN) defended Lieberman on the Rachel Maddow Show and elsewhere, arguing the Democrats would be more effective to simply chastise Joe but not punish him. After all, he argued, they could always remove him from his chairmanship later, if he was being uncooperative.
Two fatal flaws with this argument: 1) Joe had already proved he was uncooperative and pursues an agenda that is totally oriented toward whatever Tel Aviv wants and is good for Joe, and 2) It’s not so easy to remove a Senate committee chair; in fact, it requires a floor vote, which is subject to filibuster.
Which brings us back to the main reason the Democrats are now eating crow and welcoming Lieberman back into the fold: They still have a reasonable shot at 60 Senate seats (if you include independents Lieberman and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who caucus with them). The fallacious logic is that by letting bygones be bygones, Lieberman will be effervescing with gratitude and will suddenly start holding hearings and getting tough on the Homeland Security Department excesses rampant under the Bush administration, which will not likely just go away on Jan. 20.
So for fear he would take vengeance of his own and join the GOP or just retire (whereupon Connecticut’s Republican governor would presumably appoint a Republican) the Senate Democrats decided to cave and announced this morning that Turncoat Joe would keep his Homeland Security chairmanship but might lose a less significant committee assignment.
Should it really be necessary to observe that disciplining senators is a lot like rearing children? If you approve of (or at least tolerate) their unacceptable behavior, you’ve done nothing but reinforce it, sending the perfectly clear message that it’s perfectly all right if they do it again.
Even with Lieberman and potential wins in Alaska and Minnesota, the Dems will fall short of 60 votes unless they can pull out a win in the Georgia runoff election. On most issues they’ll still need some Republicans to cross the aisle. We know from experience Lieberman himself won’t vote with them on most issues of national security, and certainly not anything remotely disadvantageous to Israel or potentially beneficial to Iran. And why should he if he doesn’t feel like it? After all Joe is a glutton for slaps on the wrist.
Post-election Democrats equal large mouth plus gelatinous spinal column. What else is new?
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Listen to songs from a new CD by Steve Klinger:
Perhaps you have raised children, whereas I have not, but I enjoyed your analogy re training kids vis a vis disciplining Joe. It’s best I never had any children, for if little Joe was my son, I undoubtedly would have been locked away years ago for strapping him to his high chair, demanding he sit there until he ate his mush or until it (or he) turned ashen gray and grew moldy, whichever came first.
But you have to hand it to little Joe who has learned the ways of gaining, wielding, and keeping the power despite whoever rules, to include “large mouth gelatinous spinal column-less democrats.” (Wow! Now that’s what I call waxing poetic!!)
Thanks for re-ordering my rambling descriptive adjectives. For posterity, I think the descriptor needs some more fine-tuning (after all, isn’t “gelatinous spinal column” an oxymoron?), and then to add “-less” would seem to negate the entire questionable paradox. The image (like its subject) also lacks huevos, as they say in these parts.
So…how about identifying the species as the “large mouth testicle-free invertebrate Democrats”, which can be abbreviated as the LMTFI Democrats? Of course the Spanish vernacular is a lot shorter: Pendejos.
admin:
My apologies. I never like to misquote anyone. Obviously, my ‘cut and paste’ function must be corrupted. (If I had just read what I wrote before posting I might have realized that…or maybe not.)
As far as my bi-linguality goes, I’m extremely limited in that area, so “slime mold” works well for me. Although, I confess, “pendejos” has a nice ring to it.
Dear dada2u, no offense intended. Hey, I was mainly trying to redact my own repetitious redundancy. But I welcome the opportunity to explain the wonderfully idiomatic word pendejo. Literally, it’s a dangling pubic hair, but the connotations include coward, jerk and cuckold, all befitting descriptors of Lieberman’s capitulating colleagues.
pendejo
pendejo, -a
masculine or feminine noun
1. coward (informal) (cobarde) (Mexican Spanish)
2. jerk (muy informal) (tonto) (Am), tosser (British)
Copyright © 2006 Chambers Harrap Publishers Limited
pendejo [pen-day' -ho]
noun
1. Hair over the pubis and groin. (m)
2. Coward (cobarde), poltroon. (m)
3. (Cono Sur) Kid (muchacho). (m)
article
4. silly (necio), stupid; irresponsible (irresponsable). (Ante Meridian & Latin American) (m)
5. Smart (listo). (Andes) (m)
6. Ham-fisted (torpe). (Caribbean & Mexico) (m)
Velazquez® Spanish and English Dictionary. Copyright © 2007 by Velazquez® Press. All rights reserved