The Splitter/Robot Argument

I read the thread on Hastert last night, and I think I wind up agreeing with Megan and Hoke. Although their tone was not exactly helpful.

I've never "sucked on Hastert's bone" as charged, but allow me to stand up for him now. Apart from the gobsmackingly stupid stance on the William Jefferson search, he's done a fair job as Speaker of the House. Pretty much every decent bill comes out of the House, and without the House at least pushing towards the conservative side, the Senate would strike compromises every time between liberals and RINO's.

I give him a pass on the Mark Foley business, because even if he only cared about the politics of this, he would have forced Foley's resignation had he known about the salacious emails. It doesn't make sense to me he'd cover up something so huge when a winning alternative was available to him (force Foley out, get an untainted candidate to run in the safe seat). It's not as if Mark Foley was some politically important figure to justify such a cover up. He was a nobody.

As for Frist, let me guess what he was trying to say. As with Vietnamese support for Ho Chi Minh, there is a simple nationalistic element as well as an ideological element to the Pashtun's support of the Taliban. Some Pashtuns may mostly support the Taliban because it represents their own tribal political movement, and may not be terribly hardcore on the Medieval Mass Murder agenda of the group. He may have meant merely that it makes sense to appeal to such tribal-loyalty supporters of the Taliban in order to split them away from the committed true Taliban believers.

Either way, he's just one guy, and not even a very important guy anymore.

Some questioned whether Democratic bogeymen were enough reason to vote for a party so prone to missteps. Actually, I think now, the answer is yes-- these are pretty scary people with very scary ideas, most of which they refuse to share with the American public.

And as I've said before, while we can push our own guys towards the right policies, we'll have no such influence over the Democrats. Bill Frist's people tried to walk back the cat on his gaffe twenty two minutes after the IHT article posted, and the dextrosphere began reacting rather badly to it. I don't imagine Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi or Majority Leader Harry Reid will be so eager to respond to, and adapt to, conservative criticism.

And as I've also said before, the "punish them for two years" plan isn't necessarily a good one. How do we know it will only be two years? The economy is steady, the Dow is at an all-time high, and the media, of course, will be more willing to trumpet good economic news when they can give credit to Congressional Democratic stewardship. How do we not know the the "two years in exile" won't turn into six, eight, ten, or twelve years in exile? The Republicans took the House in 1994, and managed to stay on through the nineties partly due to a growing economy and in the 00's thanks largely to 9/11. We remained in power only partly because the country agreed with us on our domestic political agenda-- a large part of the GOP's congressional success was due to outside factors. There's hardly any guarantee that similar factors won't entrech the Democrats in power for their own twelve (or more) year run.

Politics is the art of the possible, and it's simply not possible, yet, to have a consistently conservative Congress pushing our agenda. What we have is what we have, and, given that we're about to lose the entire Congress to the liberals, it seems fanciful to imagine the possibility of a strongly conservative Congress as an alternative. The perfect is, as always, the enemy of the good, and the 109th Congress, while far from perfect, has managed to at least be somewhat good, especially this past month. And if they had to be prodded to, say, vote for a border fence, at least they were so prodded, eventually.

As they said about David Duke's opponent-- "Vote for the Crook; it's important." Well, this time around, vote for the political incompetents, jackasses, RINOs, cowards, and scoundrels; it's important. It really is.

It's Better To Win A Game You Deserve To Lose Than Lose It: Not even Mark Foley's seat is necessarily lost.

Given that we could, still, maybe win this thing, maybe we should all just remember that for every idiot Republican out there there's a good Republican, like Tom Coburn. Voting the GOP out of power doesn't really hurt the RINOs, now does it? They'll be powerful swing votes in the new Republican Congress.

A Democratic Congress may be Chris Shay's wet dream.

posted by Ace at 01:48 PM

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