Okay, TEA Party folks. You’ve had your hillbilly fun. Felt relevant for a spell. Vented your spleen.
But now it’s time for the real leaders to take over and do the adult work. And you all are making that hard work of leading very unpleasant:
Driven from his party’s leadership in 1998 and sidelined for nearly a decade, Mr. Boehner, a 61-year-old Ohio native who revels in his big-family, Roman Catholic roots, now faces the challenge of harnessing the Tea Party zeal that propelled him to power without disheartening those who might be expecting too much.
While he will preside over a substantial and energized Republican majority, Mr. Boehner must contend with a Democratic president with whom he has little personal history and a Democratic Senate leader who is disinclined to make Mr. Boehner’s life easier and who failed to consider hundreds of bills passed by the House even when his own party ran it.
“The problem is going to be the grass-roots movement out in the countryside,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican House member and Washington lobbyist who served with Mr. Boehner in the 1990s. “They have no sense of the limits on a party that controls only one of the three seats of power. Managing that relationship is going to be difficult.”
And that is just one of the problems confronting Mr. Boehner, a former small-business man who has been carefully preparing for his new role for months and seems to relish the chance to finally run the often-unmanageable House the way he believes it ought to be run.
“He has worked his way back, and he has thought this through,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia and part of Mr. Boehner’s inner circle from their days together in the House.
“But, gee whiz, it is not going to be easy,” Mr. Chambliss added. “We have a bunch of those House guys who are really on fire.”
Yeah. Those pesky principles. They so totally burn, don’t they…?
This is what we’re up against.
Elections aren’t enough. We need to rethink tar and feathers.
I know a few places that sell good, long, stout rails.
Don’t get sad, get furious — that’s my motto.
Just keep sending the bills to the Senate. Every damn week. Short, sweet, simple bills that everyone can understand and most can get behind. Remind the electorate, every damn week, that Mr Reid and Mr Obama are what’s standing in the way of the reforms we’re clamoring for. Remind the electorate, every damn week, that Mr Reid and Mr Obama need to be removed from power at the earliest opportunity. An Obama giving $50,000 speeches about the plight of the poor, and a Reid relegated to minority leader of the Senate Subcommittee on Streamline Senate Committee Structures would be a welcome improvement to the District and to the health of our republic.
In the meantime, we have two years to de-fund and de-fang the Executive agencies, and to draw up plans for how to dismantle the rest once the obstacles are removed in 2012. Two years to prepare the battlespace and to re-educate our neighbors about the government’s proper role in our lives.
I remain cautiously optimistic that we can pull the pendulum back in the direction of sanity. But I’m keeping my tar hot, just in case.
About the Senate this can be said but about the House? The Speaker is as close to a ruler as we get. Great power and great responsibility for all that comes out of that body. The Senate is managed, the House is run.
Energy often arrives in the form of heat, so no surprise there. Deal is, pouring the fuel to the fire to keep it going. The fuel in this politics business is the voting public.
Witness the new moron-in-chief, the next Nancy Pelosi waiting in the wings:
Now is it health care reform that explodes the deficit, as I believe? Or is it repeal of ObamaCare, as she would have the public believe, that explodes the deficit?
Hammering demagogues like Debbie ought to be one among the priorities. Let the voting public form an impression of the utter stupidity the stuttering incoherence reigning on the left.
So we’re going to ride Boehner out of town on a rail based on quotes from two other people? One of which isn’t even in office anymore?
WTF? Can we even give the guy a chance to fail?
Sdferr made an excellent point. Asshattery the likes of which spews from Wasserman as a matter of course, should be beat down, repeatedly.
Somebody should remind Debbie that not even the CBO believes the CBO numbers on ObamaCare. Debbie’s a lying liar who lies.
Ascending ascending: The House is about to be in session — C-Span live-streams.
We need more elections, and more of them in which people are actually paying attention to who they’re electing and what they’ve been up to. we need more primaries that have incumbents sweating their asses off. And it can’t hurt to keep a nice big pot of tar on the boil, nice and conspicuous-like.
More Bob Bennetts, more Mike Castles, more Bob Ingles, etc…
Perhaps the Progressive-socialists like Nadler would like to read aloud from their own “sacred texts” on the floor of the House.
The New York Times is purposefully trotting out this divisive kind of stuff to hurt starbord side morale; they’re trying to retain their positions as the provacateurs in chief. We all knew the media would be playing their usual fifth column roles.
Give Boehner a chance before writing him off based on NY Times quotes; don’t fall for their pot-stirring.
I have a feeling that he’ll do just fine, and may end up surprising us all in good ways.
I’m with squid. Keep sending the inconvenient, short and sweet, bills to the Senate weekly. Let DeMint and others in the Senate clog up the works demanding up or down votes on them in the same way that the sanctimonious proggs did for the Obamunist agenda. Make some of those 23 Senators up for election in 2012 go on record opposing the Tea Party reformist agenda. My bet is they won’t.
And then it’ll be up to O! to see of he has the stones to veto the measures.
Look at all the valid suggestions in these comments. Multiply them by say a decade of such thought.
Where are we today?
The politics of liberty vs power are inherently, utterly asymmetrical. The risk of a century and more of unrelenting encroachment on American individualism is what we see unfolding: an inevitable and unheeled juggernaut aimed at owning as much dominion as it can muster at our clear expense.
You cannot reason with thieves. You cannot reason with the unreasonable. The Machine may not even be conscious; it’s probably reflexive and runs on simple fuels like greed and aggrandizement. How will various bands of significantly unorganized voters reign it in, and to what philosophy?
There may be an answer but it’s escaped us for decades.
We eem to think it can be found in compromise. It ain’t in there.
Thank you Democrat Caucus for re-nominating Nancy D’Alessandro Pelosi to the office of Speaker of the House. You stay with the old girl and her old ways to your eternal honor, even though your finger-nails tear from their beds. All hail.
You need to beat down the CBO first. The fact that the Republicans exempted the Obamacare repeal from CutGo is also a problem. That gives Wasserman cover for her claims and puts the Republicans on the defensive.
What should be the Republican strategy with the upcoming debt ceiling limit? I’m thinking Obama is willing to play chicken with it, but the Dems in the Senate will cave quickly.
Was that intended to demonstrate your grasp of the political energy in the country alex? The Democrat-Socialist left is on the march, on the offensive, due to the strength of their superior political ideology? Funny, that.
Elections aren’t enough. We need to rethink tar and feathers.
Rethink? That would imply that I had stopped thinking about them at some point. Far from it….
This had nothing to do with Boehner as such. It was intended only to show the kind of thinking still very prevalent inside the beltway among the GOP establishment.
Alex eats boogers, sdferr. Given his desire to blame the CBO rather than the system itself, and the Dems manipulation of same, is of no surprise.
There may be an answer but it’s escaped us for decades.
There still remains one method we all know but have not tried.
If you can’t beat the system, break it.
Kind of a last resort though.
So do you guys just always want to fight? I didn’t think I posted anything even remotely inflammatory.
Given your integrity, alex_walter, it must be us guys.
Heck alex, I was only asking whether you’d like to re-evaluate your calculation that the Republicans are on the defensive, against all the evidence before us. I don’t think your assessment inflammatory, so much as ill-considered. Not afire, not hot, but cool, like an old bucket filled with yesterday’s piss.
But hey, you carry on however you see fit, since no one can stop you.
True. There’s never anything inflammatory in anything you post.
Except “and” and “the.”
the situation our failshit little country is in is a exponentially more dire than Boehnerdouche thinks it’s in his interest to communicate
he’s every bit as much about governance as failure management as bumblefuck is I think
*is* exponentially more dire not is a
You could always come clean about the different identities you’ve posted under –earn a little good faith by offering some up.
Totally disagree with happy on Boehner.
There it is. It’s out there now.
I’m surprised you took such a brave step, alp. Strength to you, sir. Strength.
Tar and feathers. The old tradition of riding an undesirable out of town on a rail. And bring back dueling.
And then it’ll be up to O! to see of he has the stones to veto the measures.
Can save you the trouble Bob, he has no stones. I’ve always been nurturing the fanatasy that he folds and resigns, however I can also see a scenario where he just simply folds repeatedly to pressure, pisses off his loony base and winds up getting primaried in 2012 and comes to the general election severely hobbled.
Those that didn’t catch VDH and Major Garrett on Dennis Miller yesterday – go listen to the podcast. (its free on Itunes).
Thanks cranky. I’m holding on by a thread.
*baleful glance*
“House Republican leaders said Tuesday highway and mass-transit programs should no longer be shielded from budget cuts, and immediately drew fire from states, the construction industry and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
[…]
The Chamber, which contributed heavily to GOP congressional candidates in the midterm elections, said in a letter last week that subjecting highway spending to the uncertainty of annual budget cuts would lead to more job losses in the battered industry. The letter was also signed by groups tied to the construction industry.
“This proposal simply ensures we won’t be required to spend more on transportation projects than we take in,” said Brendan Buck, spokesman for the Republican transition team. Ron Utt of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said the policy change would treat transportation spending like other domestic programs.
“There’s no reason why federal transportation programs … should be held sacrosanct in comparison to other discretionary spending,” Mr. Utt said.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703808704576062342133580266.html
How so, happy? How is Boehner “every bit as much about governance as failure management as bumblefuck”?
Heh, Boehner’s emotions get the better of him again, which is odd, considering that he’s a damn good golfer and getting to be a low scoring golfer is often largely a matter of achieving tremendous self-control where emotions are concerned.
hooray blinky’s last moments
I cry after every birdie
And after every snap-hook, what alp?
because Mr. OI his program is a losing more slowly program… what needs to be done is very roadmappy and he knows that and he needs to say as much out loud… instead he hems and haws while our little country makes an unseemly failshit spectacle of itself
The smothered golf ball requires a special talking-to. More colorful.
He’s showing stalwart self-control now not to reach down and throttle this self-indulgent values twat standing right in front of him, gotta say.
ah, so highway programs have been added to the list of first cuts, alongside teachers and firefighters.
Color me unsurprised.
How about an across the board 10% cut on everything government, including entitlements? Sounds pragmatic to me…
how sweet watching blinky give up the gavel
good bye failshit speaker
Not afire, not hot, but cool, like an old bucket filled with yesterday’s piss.
Ouch! Normally, smart young urchins pause for reflection after being smacked round the back of the hands with a ruler.
Why do you hate yesterday’s piss, sdferr?
A friend of mine and Better Half’s took office today. I hope he does not turn into a critter. I will remind him.
JeffG,
My unsolicited advice was more of a global statement and not directed at you. I missed the point of the post, I guess.
My opining was more to point out the NYTimes usual propagandizing, and certainly not to put forth the erroneous notion that all of the faux-staunch GOP pragmatists, good men all to be sure, had epiphanies over the holiday recess.
Because there’s still many that we need to be rid of to be sure.
Ah, tough loss Eleanor. Better luck next Congress I guess.
Text of Boehner’s speech.
And a hammer from York on Pelosi’s.
this is what I mean… “hard work and tough decisions” and then he blah blah blahs for the whole rest of his speech about his prissy bullshit openness … there’s certainly no sense that our debt must not be allowed to eclipse the size of our entire economy… just a general sense that Boehnerdouche stands ready to manage this failshittery.
There’s absolutely no hint of responsibility for all of the spendings what derive from the last time Boehnerdouche held the gavel. That was all just a big oopsy.
Someone should bam this failshit taco upside the head with a 14-cup cuisinart.
That was a non sequitur but nevertheless I feel the truth of it.
but he cried so there’s that
That’s a funny line, feets.
Not so funny was that foolish quasi-communist bint Pelosi Galore’s ignoring the lasting effects of her stint at the levers — a stint that produced a roughly 50% increase in the national debt after her most sacred promises to pay as her and the rest of those foolish quasi-communist bints went in the most honest and bipartisan congress in the history of the United Socialist States of America — so as to boast loudly while being aptly deposed today. I’m sorry; I meant graceless foolish quasi-communist bint.
That’s not funny at all. It’s not funny to the point there should be state trials for these constitutional criminals but alas, there can never, ever, ever be. Because we — speaking in the collective although decidedly not personal “we” — haven’t the stones in this nation to enforce so much as oaths of office when we have foolish quasi-communist press bints daily and overtly revising the constitution into toe cheese.
Why they bother to revise such a non-entity I do not know but there you you have it.
Anyway, 14-cup cuisinarts are a fine and good idea. Provided enough of them exist. Figuratively speaking.
Anyway, 14-cup cuisinarts are a fine and good idea. Provided enough of them exist.
535 shouldn’t be hard to find. And happy, that was funny as hell.
The “race card” was right at the top of the deck, as always.
I must admit happyfeet, I didn’t find Boehner’s speech to be all that bad; not anywhere near as bad as Madame Pelosi’s.
Seems like he’s gotten the message that they are there to represent the will of their constituents, and not make failshit deals with the Obamunists; not to do what they think is good for us proles…
And is real transparency a bad thing?
Maybe you should consider giving the guy a chance, you know? Perhaps chalk up what happened after he took over for DeLay as inexperienced, unforced, errors of loyalty to G.W. Bush.
Let’s see what happens.
he seems to be fixated on process… if he doesn’t reflect back at me a sense of urgency commensurate with what I feel then he’s losing the moment
yes I realize that is a somewhat subjective view
also graceless is a very excellent word for Nancy Pelosi
[…] Down Venezuela’s Legislative Opposition Vows To Bring Down Chavez in 2012 BLOGS & STUFF Protein Wisdom: Pragmatism Ascending Cold Fury: Sweet, Sweet Liberal Tears Cubachi: Palin Gets Results – Death Panels Removed From […]
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Serr8d, Bill Turner. Bill Turner said: Those Pesky Principles, They Just Get In The Way http://bit.ly/igxGaR #tcot #gop #teaparty #p2 #ocra […]