• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Before Header

  • About Us
  • Lexicon
  • Contact Us
  • Our Store
  • ↑
  • ↓
  • ←
  • →

Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Everybody saw this coming.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

…and a burning sense of injustice to juice the soul.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Mobile Menu

  • Four Directions Montana
  • Donate with Venmo, Zelle & PayPal
  • Site Feedback
  • War in Ukraine
  • Submit Photos to On the Road
  • Politics
  • On The Road
  • Open Threads
  • Topics
  • COVID-19 Coronavirus
  • Authors
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Lexicon
  • Our Store
  • Politics
  • Open Threads
  • 2024 Elections
  • Garden Chats
  • On The Road
  • Targeted Fundraising!
You are here: Home / Open Threads / Absolutely Amazing

Absolutely Amazing

by John Cole|  October 3, 20022:25 pm| Leave a Comment

This post is in: Open Threads

FacebookTweetEmail

Absolutely Amazing

You absolutely have to adore the sheer audacity of the Democrats. Their latest electoral hijinks are precisely why, even though I agree with them on many social issues and detest Repuiblican positions, I vote for Republicans. I think Democrats as a whole, and now it seems to the individual, are corrupt, vile, and evil. I thought with the passing of Clinton, they would rehab themselves from the years of lying and deceit. I was wrong.

Today, two Dems whose blogs I read are now in full-on backpedal mode. The first is Josh Marshall, who seems to spen his entire day parsing the words of different members of the Bush administration for the slightest inconsistency so he can yell out “Gothca!” Apparently he was used to the previous administration’s highly synchronized lying.

At any rate, today, Marshall spouts out this gem:

The Forrester campaign is now headed to the United States Supreme Court, the normal recourse of Republicans who can’t win elections with majorities but aren’t inclined to see that as the end of the story.

Hunh? What? Excuse me?

Let’s see if I have this right. Torricelli is the Senator, duly elected. He lies, cheats, and accepts bribes in office. The Senate determines he is so awful that they must publicly denounce him, but that he is not awful enough to be kicked out of the Senate (which should tell you something about the Senate). He runs for re-election, brushing aside the admonishment from the Senate Ethics Committee, with the total support of the Democrat Party Leadership. As late as last week, Tom Daschle was stumping for him. And then the bomb exploded.

A poll shows that Torricelli is 13 points behind his Republican (gasp) opponent. Cue the tears, cue the politicos, cue Bill Clinton. Torricelli announces he is not going to resign, but that he is withdrawing from the race “so that he will not lose the Democrat Majority in the Senate,” in a weepy speech in which he asks why we won’t forgive him for things he claims he never did.

So, the Democrats now need an extralegal solution to their crisis. So, tell me Josh? Who headed to court because you can not win the election the legal way? Remember, they went to court not to address any wrongdoing that was hurting their candidate, but for PURELY and NAKEDLY partisan motives- they were losing, and well, that just can’t happen. The system was going to work, and a sleaze was going to be voted out of office. Of course, the right thing to do would have been for the Democrat Leadership to try and fight Toricelli in the primary, but at that time he was way ahaid of any Republican and still able to raise gobs of cash.

Remember the old phrase to be careful what you wish for- the Democrats got their way with a Supreme Court ‘stacked with Republican appointees’ as Josh noted (court makeup 4 Dems, 2 Rep, 1 Ind), who determined law is less important that making sure a major political machine gets its way. And the public is responding. It is sleazy. It was unfair. It was stacking the deck. It is switching teams in the 4th quarter of the Superbowl. They probably lost two Senate seats in Middle America for their behavior.

Now they must start spinning. Matt Yglesias, who endorsed an ends justifies the means approach to winning the NJ seat, just to kep those evil Republicans out of control, is now a reformer:

“If anyone has any good suggestions as to how to reform the primary process to make it less of a rubber-stamp for incumbents, I’m all ears (and no, public financing of campaigns wouldn’t solve the problem since you could hardly just give public funds to anyone who decided one day he’d like to run for Senate).”

No mention of the ‘rubber-stamp’ committee that went behind closed doors the other day and selected (Gov. McGreevey’s term) Frank Lautenberg to replace Torricelli. Why reform the primary process, Matt? It means nothing- you guys have demonstrated you can do whatever the hell you want, anyway. The law is for other people and for circumstances in which the Republicans are losing. Thiscall for reform reminds me of Clinton/Gore- they break all the campaign finance laws on the books, and then find some shady things to do which aren’t on the books (“No controlling legal authority blah blah blah”). When they get caught, they stump for new laws to keep themselves from being crooked again.

Now Josh is asserting that the last minute supra-legal switcheroo will not happen again- not because he has any logic behind his assertion, not because he has a crystal ball, but because he knows the public is about to give the Dems a punch right in the poll numbers for this shady behavior. Josh really isn’t asserting, as much as he is hoping:

Some readers who have written in tell me that this is a recipe for electoral chaos, that every time a candidate looks like he’s going down the tubes he can just pull out and bring in a ringer. There’s a superficial logic to the argument. But such arguments toward practical effect must withstand some measure of logical scrutiny and this one really doesn’t. When filing deadlines come down how many candidates do you usually see rushing to cash out their candidacies? Right, not many. The sort of people who run for elective office just don’t do that sort of thing. And in how many of those cases is there another credible candidate waiting in the wings? Not often. If there were, that other candidate probably would have won the primary. Say what you will about what happened here, it’s hardly likely to become a pattern.

Whatever, Josh. That is what you guys said when you were trying to re-write election codes in Florida. You boys have your Pyrrhic- I hope you can survive it. And could you find a less smug picture of yourself to put on your website?

FacebookTweetEmail
Previous Post: « This may be the greatest
Next Post: Two new blogs on the »

Comments are closed.

Primary Sidebar

Recent Comments

  • WaterGirl on Henry Would Like His Lunch Right Now, Please (Open Thread) (Apr 15, 2024 @ 1:43pm)
  • BellaPea on Henry Would Like His Lunch Right Now, Please (Open Thread) (Apr 15, 2024 @ 1:42pm)
  • HeleninEire on Henry Would Like His Lunch Right Now, Please (Open Thread) (Apr 15, 2024 @ 1:42pm)
  • Geminid on Take the Fucking Win (Apr 15, 2024 @ 1:39pm)
  • Melancholy Jaques on Take the Fucking Win (Apr 15, 2024 @ 1:38pm)

🎈Keep Balloon Juice Ad Free

Become a Balloon Juice Patreon
Donate with Venmo, Zelle or PayPal

Balloon Juice Posts

View by Topic
View by Author
View by Month & Year
View by Past Author

Balloon Juice Meetups!

All Meetups
Talk of Meetups – Meetup Planning
Proposed BJ meetups list from frosty

Fundraising 2023-24

Wis*Dems Supreme Court + SD-8
Virginia House Races
Four Directions – Montana
Worker Power AZ
Four Directions – Arizona
Four Directions – Nevada

Featuring

Medium Cool
Artists in Our Midst
Authors in Our Midst
Positive Climate News
War in Ukraine
Cole’s “Stories from the Road”
Classified Documents Primer

Calling All Jackals

Site Feedback
Nominate a Rotating Tag
Submit Photos to On the Road
Balloon Juice Mailing List Signup
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Links)
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Posts)

Fix Nyms with Apostrophes

Balloon Juice for Ukraine

Donate

Twitter / Spoutible

Balloon Juice (Spoutible)
WaterGirl (Spoutible)
TaMara (Spoutible)
John Cole
DougJ (aka NYT Pitchbot)
Betty Cracker
Tom Levenson
David Anderson
Major Major Major Major
ActualCitizensUnited

Political Action 2024

Postcard Writing Information

Balloon Juice for Four Directions AZ

Donate

Balloon Juice for Four Directions NV

Donate

Site Footer

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Comment Policy
  • Our Authors
  • Blogroll
  • Our Artists
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2024 Dev Balloon Juice · All Rights Reserved · Powered by BizBudding Inc

Share this ArticleLike this article? Email it to a friend!

Email sent!