I SEEM TO RECALL THAT AS A TAD DISRESPECTFUL
Either I'm having a reading comprehension problem or the Norman Ornstein quote in this New York Times article about the battles between President Obama and the GOP just doesn't make sense:
... on Wednesday, Speaker John A. Boehner became what historians say was the first ever to tell a sitting president that no, he could not deliver an address to a joint session of Congress on the date of his choice. On Thursday, Representative Joe Walsh said in a Twitter message that he would fly home to Illinois rather than serve as "a prop of another one of the president’s speeches."
It seems they simply do not like the man.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said this year that his first goal was to see Mr. Obama defeated.
"The closest we have come to this was Tom DeLay's hatred for Clinton when he demanded impeachment of him," said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. "But that was one guy or a handful. Now it is much more widespread, and the toxicity is, and culture is different now."
Um, that was practically every Republican member of Congress -- Clinton actually was impeached, remember? With all but five Republicans in the House voting to impeach? And all but ten Republicans in the Senate voting to convict? I know we're in denial about the psychopathy of the Limbaugh/Murdoch-era Republican Party, but I didn't think that had been forgotten.
Look, I criticized Obama for picking a fight he wasn't in any position to win, but let's not lose sight of why he was in no position to win. It's not because he's black. It's not because he's weak. OK, maybe those are contributing factors. To some extent it's because he hasn't really had any success in dealing with the economy. But mostly it's because the Republican Party, for at least two decades, has decided to render the country ungovernable whenever a Democrat holds the White House and tries to function in any way as a Democrat -- a state of affairs about which Beltway insiders are in total denial, and about which the public never gets angry.
