What do we want? Tax breaks for the rich! When do we want ’em? Now! Brushing up on his cheerleader skills in Arkansas (as a not-so-veiled threat to Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln), Dubya demands that Congress speed up passage of his fatcat cut. But so far, the all stick and no carrot tactics of the Bushies are only continuing to tick off GOP moderates like Olympia Snowe.
Category: The Senate
Time Bandits.
With the House GOP prepared to make a deal with moderates, the White House unrolls a new pitch for the “future-embezzling” Dubya dividend debacle. Arguing that bigger is better on the assumption that there’s a 1-1 relationship between low taxes and more jobs, Dubya’s simplistic proposition has even ticked off GOP economists. (As one Republican put it when queried whether Dubya’s fuzzy math makes sense, “I suppose it matters whether you think economics matters.”) Meanwhile, Bill “kittenkiller” Frist takes the blame for congressional in-fighting on the size of the tax cut.
War on the Floor.
As the Republican rift over the Dubya tax cut widens, conservatives prepare to oust anti-cut GOP moderates like Olympia Snowe, John McCain, and Arlen Specter. As a result, Specter tries to shore up his freak-show-right creds by joining Majority Leader Bill Frist in defending Rick Santorum’s outbreak of gaybashing (calling Santorum a “voice for inclusion and compassion” is a bit much, isn’t it?). Snowe and Chafee, for their part, have condemned Santorum’s remarks (Via Medley.) While I’m all for the GOP imploding, isnt it about time for the Dems to pile on the heat? To paraphrase Carville, when your opponent is drowning, throw him an anvil.
Mmmm, bacon.
Yum. Both the Dubya administration and the Senate bloat up the war bill with pork barrel spending. As John McCain put it, “I didn’t realize that Al Qaeda had reached all the way to the South Pole.” Speaking of wartime handouts, Dems Henry Waxman and John Dingell want further scrutiny into contracts given to Halliburton subsidiaries by the GAO. All I know is, if the Clinton administration were involved in this type of quid pro quo, Dan Burton would have had an investigation up and running weeks ago.
No Representation with Taxation.
While still desperately in denial about the nation’s exploding debt, the GOP has, as expected, gone to war against its own moderate wing and threatened to sink the budget, in the hopes of preserving Dubya’s $726 billion tax giveaway. This is despite the fact that the Daschle Dems have in essence already capitulated again, agreeing to pass an equally wrong-headed compromise plan half that size. Sigh…the Dems really have to get it together. At any rate, hopefully moderate Republicans will take DeLay’s budget blackmail for the desperate, dangerous gamble it is and call him on it. Nothing screams GOP these days quite like a government shutdown.
Now for ruin, and a red dawn.
It looks like the worst-case scenario outlined by Alternet yesterday is coming about sooner than expected. Senator Orrin Hatch leads a GOP charge to eliminate the sunset provisions in the Patriot Act, thus making permanent the sweeping antiterrorism provisions of the first bill and setting the stage for PATRIOT II. Let’s hope Hatch doesn’t have the votes.
The Gentleman From New York.
R.I.P. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan 1927-2003. At a time when the Democratic party needs articulate, intelligent, and principled statespersons more than ever, we lose one of the big ones. He will be missed.
Taxing Times.
Despite the administration’s attempt to use the war to promote tax cuts, the Senate does the right thing and slashes Dubya’s tax giveaway in half. As I said last week, it’s almost obscene to even consider this type of deficit-busting sop for the rich when America’s fighting men and women are laying their lives on the line. In times of war, even (gasp!) the affluent must bear their share of sacrifice.
Nothing Succeeds like Failure.
Daschle catches flak from Dubya’s yes-men for stating the patently obvious – that this administration’s amateurish diplomacy has embarrassed us before the world and led us to the brink of a globally unpopular, non-UN-sanctioned war. (And as David Chess pointed out by way of Medley, “the idea that the U.S. must defy the U.N. in order to punish Iraq for defying the U.N. is simply absurd.“) Of course, Daschle’s comments notwithstanding, there’s also a convincing case to be made (as Maureen Dowd does here) that the Bushies wanted diplomacy to fail from the very beginning, so as to further weaken the UN’s international standing. Inept or corrupt…take your pick. Update: Kerry gets involved as well, although, in what’s becoming a troubling pattern, he’s hedged his bets a bit.
How did it come to this?
Well, that’s that, then. Thanks to the not-insubstantial blunders of Dubya’s crack diplomatic team, it looks like we’ll be going to war WITHOUT UN approval. True, I’ve always approached this venture in Iraq with a good deal of skepticism, particularly after its success in sucking all the news out of the room during the summer of Enron. And I was disgusted by the capitulation of Congress last fall in washing their hands of the matter and ceding their constitutionally-mandated authority to declare war over to Dubya. But I still think I could have been sold on the necessity of this conflict if a clear case had ever been made by the Bushies. And, frankly, that case has not been made. Instead we’ve gotten a series of half-truths and rhetorical flourishes attempting to conflate Iraq and Al Qaeda in the American mind, despite the fact that the two despise each other (Saddam is a secular despot while Bin Laden is a fundamentalist freakshow.) And whatsmore, Dubya has now managed in two short years to squander virtually all of America’s once-considerable reservoir of international goodwill in order to prosecute a war for which the rationale still remains blurry.
The Pentagon tells us that we will win a war against Iraq with minimal difficulty, and I think they’re probably right (although obviously there are a number of Saddam-unleashing-WMD-upon-troops and/or Israel scenarios that are almost too horrifying to contemplate.) But I hold very little optimism for our handling of the post-war world — when much of the international community considers us a rogue nation and the Middle East suspects us of imperialistic intentions — given that our actions up to this point only prove that it’s currently Amateur Hour in the White House and State Department.