Hugh Hewitt, extolling the virtues of Mitch McConnell’s Senate “leadership:”
After a couple of Republican amendments failed, Mitch McConnell took to the floor and offered his own amendment, which was a Sense of the Senate that Guantanamo detainees not be allowed released or moved to U.S. soil. To conservatives, this obviously makes sense. To liberals, especially California’s Dianne Feinstein, one of the chief proponents of the effort to close the detention center at Gitmo and relocate these detainees into the American justice system, especially when tagged onto a student loan and grant bill, you’d think this measure would go down in flames. Except a funny thing happened. The bill was titled in a way that you had to vote yes to vote no, and no to vote yes. The final vote was 94-3, officially putting the Senate on record as saying terrorist detainees shouldn’t be moved to the U.S. Before the Democrats, who clearly hadn’t read the amendment, realized they screwed up, the vote was recorded.
Hahaha! ‘Tis funny and all but a game.
After throwing the Senate back into a quorum call for half an hour, the beleaguered Harry Reid came out and pulled the Salazar amendment off the floor. He’d been Mitchslapped twice in one night.
And there you have it- Hewitt and the 28% outlook on politics. While I am sure all of us appreciate how important it is to have Congressional leaders who are savvy with parliamentary procedure, for the childish Hugh, that is all that matters- winning. The Republicans are his team, right or wrong, the Demcorats are evil and bad, and my “side” must win.
It doesn’t really matter to Hugh that later on, should someone refer to that Sense of the Senate, they will not be accurately reflecting the true will of the Senate and of the people who elected them, but rather, the outcome of a cheap parlor trick. But that does not matter to Hugh, nor do principle, order, or the rule of law- winning does. He now has a Sense of the Senate he can quote repeatedly on his blog, on the air, and at cocktail parties. When someone tries to point out the truth, that can be dismissed as “nuance” or the ramblings of the libruhl media.
Mark
John yer famous. The Clown Prince of the Blogosphere has mentioned you by name:
D. Broder
Why are you getting all worked up about this? Yawn… how suburban.
This earnestness, the idea that, apart from the frankly glamorous notion of One Man steering the Ship of State, that government really can or ought to do anything to improve the lives of the governed, well, it’s cute in its way but I’m not alone in thinking that it’s the stuff of fairy tales.
There are really three kinds of people in America today, not two. There are the Red-Staters, who don’t look to DC to solve their problems. If they have to work three jobs to stay afloat, by God they do it and they don’t complain about it. They go to church on Sundays and thank God they live in a country where you can work three jobs if you want to, because that’s freedom. Then there are Blue-Staters who are just annoying. When it comes to government and what it can do, they all sound like college freshmen who just took Psych 101 – you know the type. Now I’ll grant you, they’re very earnest and very passionate, but they don’t have a clue about the way the system here really works, and when you put them beside those stoic Norman Rockwell Red-State types they just don’t measure up.
Finally, there’s the third type of American, and that’s the people who make things happen in New York and Washington DC (I’m not counting those LA flakes – they make movies and godawful amounts of cash and they fund us, but deep down they’re stoic redders or earnest blusies; they aren’t us).
Sure, there are a couple of people who get into our territory without understanding the real rules here, but we know what to do with them. And there are times when somebody who doesn’t play by the rules makes trouble for one of us, but we look after our own.
And you want to know what makes us tick? We’re rich. We’re powerful. We decide what information you get and what you don’t. We decide what’s important and what is not. And we don’t like anybody who might try to upset the apple cart.
I may have said too much…
Punchy
Boy, I wonder what this means?
Either this General is about to be out of a job, or he’s going to have to retract everything he said a day earlier. Which, of course, counts as a “clarification” to Snow.
At what point to these seemingly egregiously erroneous Generals (according to Snow) just say “fuck it, I’m tired of fucking lying for this fucking clown every single day” and just resign? Does resignation hurt their pension?
Tim F.
Mark,
Embed your links. Some of us read this site on smallish laptops.
VidaLoca
Punchy,
I heard that quote on the radio this morning — my first thought was that it was a trial balloon floated with the idea in mind of moving the goal posts…
racrecir
Republicans are the party of ideas, constantly engaged in vigorous debate of the most contentious and significant issues of the day. Republicans represent vibrancy while Democrats remain mired in the rut of their smug self-assurance. Democrats simply don’t have the intellectual chops or resourcefulness to even consider the viability of shiftiness. Republicans, on the other hand, will hash over the most effective presentation techniques and grapple with the inadequacy of philosophical foundations that heretofore had disallowed contradictions.
Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book “The Origins of Republican Dominance,” presciently foretold of this rise of ‘superior tactical cleverness’:
“The Right discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The Republican leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Fledermaus
Yep their strategy for governance consists of enacting policies that piss off liberals and democrats. The sole criteria when judging the merits of any policy is how pissed off it makes the liberals. The more pissed off they are, the better the policy.
Tax Analyst
It sounds like you admire this. To tell you the truth, it kind of pisses me off, but maybe that’s just me. Well, “All Hail Big Brother”, and have a nice day and be sure to hate whoever the Republicans tell ya to today, and whoever they tell ya to hate tomorrow. Don’t get them mixed up though or they might come and haul your cynical ass away. Yeah, have a real nice day.
sglover
Recalibrate your sarcasm detector. “The Origins of Republican Dominance” is a satiric cover for Arendt’s real 1951 work, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”. Don’t blame racrecir just becauseit happens to be a pretty damn accurate, concise description of standard operating procedure in the party of Atwater & Rove……
Tax Analyst
S Glover – It was not clear to me that racrecir was commenting sarcastically, although perhaps it should have been, if that was actually the case. If it wasn’t posted in sarcasm, then my comment still stands. If it is, well, color me insufficiently sophisticated, I suppose.
racrecir
The unedited version reads:
“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Mason
Maybe they should be reading the fucking bills on which they are voting?!
bains
One questions another’s veracity when that person is attributing statements that are made by someone else.
Of course, your veracity has been in question ever since you went sullivan several years back.
FYI the post linked was not by Hewitt.
John Cole
It says posted by Hugh Hewitt.
RicK
The AG, while saying he agrees that Gitmo should be closed, just made the argument that bringing the detainees to the US was just overwhelmingly rejected by the Senate.