Regressive Hypocrisy (Yawn…) Again

[babylonsister]

Regressive Hypocrisy (Yawn…) Again

by David Michael Green

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Again, here's another case where, just in its own right, stupidity abounds. But regressives are only getting started. Idiocy is a mere hors d'oeuvre. The truly fun part is the hypocrisy of it all. Remember how they wailed when George Bush shredded the Geneva Conventions and the Bill of Rights at Guantánamo? Remember how loudly they objected as W used over 1200 signing statements to write Congress out of the legislative loop, thus destroying separation of powers, pretty much the most prominent single idea in the Constitution? Remember how angry they were recently when it was revealed that John Yoo and others had penned legal memos allowing the president to do absolutely anything, including shutting down the press, and arresting anyone, for any reason, any time, without any guarantees of any sort of due process? Remember how the right screamed and hollered and shouted at those massive assaults on American liberty by the former president?

You don't...? Neither do I. Maybe they just missed the whole thing. Maybe they're not really such massive hypocrites for going after Obama, after all, because Fox and the rest of the Crawl Under Media oddly somehow just forgot to carry those stories.

Another great one concerns the filibuster. Apart from when Anthony Kennedy sometimes loses his mind and casts his vote with the Supreme Court's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the filibuster is the only remaining shred of power the right wing holds in Washington today. Over the last two years they've used it more than any other time in American history, and they're holding on to it tenaciously, even as we speak. This has caused Democrats, who have been given about as fat a mandate to govern as one might expect during even somewhat normal times, to play around with the idea of using the budget reconciliation process to enact legislation by simple majority vote in the Senate, thus bypassing the opportunity for a small minority of one house of one branch of the United States government to hold the entire rest of the thing hostage.

This has Republicans all in a tizzy. Judd Gregg, who has been working overtime lately to embarrass himself and his party, lamented out loud that "it is not appropriate to use reconciliation, which cuts off the role of the Senate, on something as broad and expansive as rewriting the healthcare laws of this country". Just one small problem, though. Republicans did this all the time when they were in the majority. Indeed, when they were trying to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling, Gregg himself objected strenuously to Democratic Party attempts to use the filibuster, and happily extolled the great virtues of using the reconciliation process. Back then he was quite clear on the matter, and quite emphatic: "We are using the rules of the Senate here. Is there something wrong with majority rule? I don't think so."

I don't either. And, therefore, you gotta hand it to these guys, don't you think? They have such high entertainment value that - if only they could be maintained permanently in the (super)minority - it would be worth it to keep them around just for shits and giggles.

Truly my favorite form of regressive hypocrisy on the current horizon, however, has to do with their shrill and vociferous shrieks about outrageous levels of government spending under the new Obama administration. They are really, really upset. Mind you, purely on behalf of the average American taxpayer, of course. They are outraged, and they don't mind saying so.

And who could blame them? This is, after all, the party and the ideology of fiscal discipline. We've been told this countless times, so surely it must be true. Unlike those drunken sailors in the Democratic Party, whose tax-and-spend policies bankrupt America at every turn, borrow-and-spend regressives run up fantastically larger deficits and pass them on to our kids. And what for? Only important stuff like funding giant tax breaks for the already outrageously wealthy and paying for wars based on lies.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/04-3