Don’t Just Do Something!

Sit There!

File under: Frist Pissed.

This from the NYT outlines how the most overpoweringly, awesomely, crushingly , omnipotently dominant political machine in the history of the known Universe -- God’s Own Personally Fucking Endorsed Part-ay, that finally captured the entire federal government from crotch to crown after having spent the last thirty years fanatically clawing, sliming, bellowing, stealing and lying their way to power -- spent the last year.

Hint: It is possible I expended more productive mental terawatts in eight hours passed out in my own drool dreaming up new topiary patterns for my pubic hair than these fuckknuckels burned on the nations’s business in the last year on the public dime.

And hey! Take a wild guess who these cranky losers are blaming!

(emphasis added)

September 25, 2006
Congress Ending, but Much Is Left Undone
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 — A Congress derided as do-nothing has a week to do something, and the prospects are cloudy.
Procrastination, power struggles and partisanship have left Congress with substantial work to finish before breaking for the elections. The fast-approaching recess and the Republican focus on national security legislation make it inevitable that much of the remainder will fall by the wayside.

At best, it appears that just 2 of the 11 required spending bills will pass, and not one has been approved so far, forcing a stopgap measure to keep the federal government open. No budget was enacted. A popular package of business and education tax credits is teetering. A lobbying overhaul, once a top priority in view of corruption scandals, is dead. The drive for broad immigration changes has derailed.

An offshore oil drilling bill painted as an answer to high gas prices is stalled. Plans to cut the estate tax and raise the minimum wage have floundered, and an important nuclear pact with India sought by the White House is not on track to clear Congress. New problems surfaced over the weekend for the annual military authorization bill. And numerous other initiatives await a planned lame-duck session in mid-November or a future Congress.

“It is disappointing where we are, and I think Republicans need to be upfront about this,” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia and a member of the House leadership. “We have not accomplished what we need to accomplish.”

Given the practical and political realities, Republicans have chosen to concentrate on legislation emphasizing their security credentials, like the bill governing interrogations and trials of terrorism detainees, a National Security Agency surveillance program, and spending on the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security.

“With obstruction from the Democrats at an all-time high, we have focused on four security issues in an effort to enact some solid, substantive accomplishments,” said Eric M. Ueland, chief of staff to Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, who is stepping down at the end of this session.

While Republicans prefer to blame Democrats for the backlog, intramural fights and sharp differences between House and Senate Republicans have been chief impediments to major legislation.

…
Circumstances have changed in Washington from the days when Republicans were famous for party discipline. President Bush, weakened by his sliding popularity, has been unable to hold sway over Congress. The Republican leadership in the House and the Senate is in transition and lacks the muscle of Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader. Republican lawmakers, many facing their most serious electoral opposition in years, are fending for themselves.

“We have no central core of political authority driving things in Washington,” said James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. “
…

“This session of Congress is not over,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, said Friday. “We are not finished with our work, and some of these issues are still in progress. What we are going to do Friday or Saturday is to take a timeout.”

Democrats have been happy throughout the year to stand almost united in both the House and the Senate against many of the Republican initiatives, forcing the majority to find enough votes to pass legislation from its own membership. That has often forced major concessions from the leadership. In other cases, Republicans in the House and the Senate have simply been unable to find common ground.

“In the 26 years I have been here,” said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, “I don’t think I have ever seen so much tension between the House and the Senate, and it is all among Republicans.”

…

This is simple.

When the hive lost their Brain Bugs


the drones got fussy and uppity and starting thinking they no longer needed a permission slip from their leadership caste every time they wanted to swipe a cracker from the cracker barrel.

Bill Frist is a weak man who sold his gifts for a mess of pottage. He came fresh from the showroom floor inspired and enspined with no grand vision of anything other than awkwardly jumping through whatever hoops James Dobson and the White House set in front of him on the promise that he’ll be considered for the White House job in ’08 if he’s a good little doggie.

Hell, at least DeLay had an organizing principle. Granted he was an ambulatory shitbag of a human being and granted his "vision" was the liquidation and looting of the federal government of the United States America, and the installation of a Confederate Shitkicker Caliphate in its place, but it was a touchstone he could draw on in times when choices had to be made.

As much as Democrats are parodied as a Party where opinions outnumber members 10-to-1, they have show remarkable party discipline over the last year. Republicans, on the other hand, are bred from the whelping box to the Authoritarian model. The are natural followers who find their inner peace only when marching in obsequious lockstep while someone else does the thinking.

And right now all of the “thinking” seems to be coming from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, and the acrid stink of their own burning skin seems to have awakened at least a few on the Right that all the “thinking” from the West Wing seems calibrated to sacrificing everyone and everything else in order to salvage the legacy of one halfwit who barely acknowledges their existence except when he needs his ass wiped in public.