Temper Tantrum Continues In Full Senate
Captain Ed
As hard as I tried, I just couldn't get worked up about the day-long temper tantrum staged by the Senate Democrats in today's debate for the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice. Yes, the debate wasted time and money that could have been put to better use -- but probably wouldn't have been. The Democrats called Rice a liar and a Bush stooge, but that's been their level of rhetoric for two years now, and continually pointing it out grows wearisome.
After a while, I have to start finding humor in the fact that the Democratic leadership has become so clueless as to completely miss the fact that they just staged a day-long parody of their last presidential campaign. It confirms for the American public that the Democrats have learned nothing from three successive electoral-cycle defeats and are likely to learn nothing after the next one, either.
So, let's move on to the Democratic Follies, where the ever-shrinking Democratic caucus does their sob-and-dance for C-SPAN and your amusement. First, we have Robert Byrd, whose status as the only Senator to have run on his Klan membership didn't keep him from jumping at the opportunity to block the confirmation of a black woman for Secretary of State:
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"Accountability is not a negotiable commodity," Mr. Byrd said, arguing that to confirm Ms. Rice would be to approve policies that had isolated the United States, made it more vulnerable to terrorism and cost American lives under false pretexts.
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Would that be anything like making isolationist statements like saying he would never fight "with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds"? Could it be that Byrd himself committed a few terrorist acts as Kleagle, burning crosses as part of his civic activities? Or how about his rambling lecture on "white n****rs" from March 2001:
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I think we talk about race too much. I think those problems are largely behind us. ... There are white niggers. I've seen a lot of white niggers in my time; I'm going to use that word.
We just need to work together to make our country a better country, and I'd just as soon quit talking about it so much.
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While you're pondering that, we move on to our next moments of comedy, this time courtesy of Brave Sir Dayton of Minnesota, our hometown boy. Brave Sir Dayton says Condi lied to him!
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Mr. Dayton said Ms. Rice had helped to construct a foreign policy based on a false foundation "by hiding the truth, hiding the truth in matters of life and death, war and peace."
"I really don't like being lied to, repeatedly, flagrantly," Mr. Dayton said.
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Minnesota voters will roar with laughter at that assertion, not just because Dayton is lying now, but because we all remember Brave Sir Dayton scurrying home from Washington DC due to a supposedly grave threat of terrorist attack in the nation's capitol. That occurred shortly before the election, but as it turns out, no other Congressman followed Dayton as he beat his very brave retreat. Some of his own caucus called him "paranoid" and "ridiculous". Oddly enough, Dayton returned to DC the day after the election, pronouncing the city secure enough for his exalted presence.
You don't suppose that the same Mark Dayton obsessed with the truth today lied to his Minnesota constituents when he bugged out of DC, and did it to show up George Bush for the election?
Once you catch your breath, let's check out the comic stylings of a true heavyweight, Ted Kennedy. Kennedy pontificated on how Rice "misled" America on WMD. Of course, even Kennedy told Johns Hopkins in 2002 that Saddam had WMD, even if Kennedy didn't consider that notion particularly troubling:
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We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction. Our intelligence community is also deeply concerned about the acquisition of such weapons by Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria and other nations. But information from the intelligence community over the past six months does not point to Iraq as an imminent threat to the United States or a major proliferator of weapons of mass destruction.
In public hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, CIA Director George Tenet described Iraq as a threat but not as a proliferator, saying that Saddam Hussein — and I quote — "is determined to thwart U.N. sanctions, press ahead with weapons of mass destruction, and resurrect the military force he had before the Gulf War." That is unacceptable, but it is also possible that it could be stopped short of war.
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By Kennedy's own words, Rice hardly misled anyone, unless Kennedy did the same. They both had the same information from Western intelligence agencies, but drew different political viewpoints from it. Now, this may not be as hilarious as Kennedy lecturing Alberto Gonzalez on the effects of drowning and the effrontery that waterboarding inflicts on the Massachussetts Senator as a human being:
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KENNEDY: Well, just as an attorney, as a human being, I would have thought that if there were recommendations that were so blatantly and flagrantly over the line in terms of torture, that you might have recognized them. I mean, it certainly appears to me that water boarding, with all its descriptions about drowning someone to that kind of a point, would come awfully close to getting over the border, and that you'd be able to at least say today, There were some that were recommended or suggested on that, but I certainly wouldn't have had a part of that, as a human being. But as I understand you are saying now that no matter what they recommended or what they discussed, there was not going to be anything in there that was going to be too bad or too outrageous for you to at least to raise some objection.
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Most of you may be laughing, but I can assure you that Mary Jo Kopechne's family isn't.
Now, of course I'm being satirical when I describe what happened in today's Senate session as comedy. I'm not kidding around when I describe the idiocy of using these three to call Condoleezza Rice a liar and a stooge as laughable, nor when I deduce that Democratic leadership is a joke. No one's laughing, except possibly Karl Rove.
Posted by Captain Ed
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