Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Another day, another Con can't practice what he preaches:

If I told you that Paul Stanley was caught having an affair with a winsome young blond girl, you probably wouldn't be shocked. Of course, you'd probably be thinking I was talking about the lead singer of KISS. If I told you that Paul Stanley was a God-fearing and gay-hating family values Republican state senator from Tennessee, you'd probably be even less shocked. Par for the course these days, isn't it?

The young girl, McKensie Morrison, was a legislative intern in Stanley's office when the married senator with two children started doing the mattress mambo with her. She's now 22 years old and was, obviously, even younger when this all began. Stanley went to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to report he was being blackmailed by Morrison's boyfriend -- then admitted to them that he was having an affair with her.

The only shocking thing about this sexcapade is that Stanley's resigning as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. I guess it's one thing to "hike the Appalachian Trail," but getting blackmailed by the loser boyfriend afterward is a bridge too far. Mind you, though, he's not shamed enough to resign altogether, even though he should be:

Nashville Post:

In April of this year, I and a group of Planned Parenthood supporters from Memphis met with Sen. Paul Stanley in his office. We told him about all the good Planned Parenthood does in Memphis by providing basic gynecological health care and birth control to teens and young people and also providing medically-accurate sexuality education programs. I had hoped to convince him that there’s a real need for our services, especially in Memphis, which has the highest sexually transmitted infection rates in the nation and one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates as well. Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis Region tries to help young people and low income people, almost all of whom are already sexually active protect themselves from pregnancy and disease. Sen. Paul Stanley is my state senator, and he made it clear at our meeting that he didn’t care about my concerns about these issues that have a major impact in the Memphis area and that he would not ever support Planned Parenthood.

He told us that he didn’t believe young people should have sex before marriage anyway, that his faith and church are important to him, and he wants to promote abstinence, blah, blah, blah. Now I realize that when he said those things, he had already been sexing it up with an intern and her boyfriend was trying to blackmail him with dirty pictures.

How fucking his young intern squares with "young people shouldn't have sex before marriage" escapes me. I do hope Mr. Stanley will attempt an explanation at some point. It would be hilarious.

Sarah Palin quit her job today, thus freeing up her time for - well, nobody knows quite what. She left a final fuck-you behind her:

Palin's departure -- she's officially handing over power to Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell at a community picnic in Fairbanks -- has left many Alaskans largely confused. And state legislators are scrambling to convene a special session to recover $28.6 million in federal energy funds that Palin rejected as one of her parting salutes to independence from Washington.

This is the woman Newt Gingrich is trying to sell as the Cons' leader on energy issues. I think that says everything there is to say about the Cons' deplorable dumbfuckery right there.

For some reason, though, Dems are still under the illusion that Cons can be productive partners in the legislative process:

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and the author of the meaningless "co opt" plan appeared on ABC's THIS WEEK and said that even with a 60 vote majority in the Senate a health care bill can't get passed without Republicans.

It's just not possible to have a Democrat-only bill?" I asked Sen. Conrad.

"No, it is not possible," he told me, "and perhaps not desirable either. We're probably going to get a better product if we go through the tough business of debate, consideration, and analysis of what we're proposing."

Well, it had damned fucking well better be possible, because you, Mr. Conrad, you yourself admitted that Sen. Jim DeMint's only intent is to murder this reform bill in its sleep:

Conrad added, "Jim, I think has been very clear, he wants to kill it. And I think that would be a tragedy because we've got a crisis here for the country."

Tell me just how you expect Cons to vote for this legislation when all they want to do is kill it dead? Hmm? The American public gave you dumbshits sixty fucking Senate seats for a reason.

So shut the fuck up about bipartisanship already and get the fucking reform done. As for shutting the fuck up about bipartisanship, that goes double for the media:

I found myself yelling at my monitor this morning, reading Adam Nagourney's NYT piece about the "possibility of bipartisanship" on health care reform. It's not Nagourney's fault, necessarily, but the piece touches all of the bases on the problems with the underlying assumptions.

...Mr. Obama is under growing pressure to choose between wooing a small band of Republicans or struggling to rally his party to use its big majorities in Congress to get the job done. The bipartisanship exhibited in the passage of two other ambitious domestic programs that offer one historical backdrop for this debate -- Social Security in 1935 and Medicare and Medicaid 30 years later -- seems increasingly improbable in today's Washington. [...]

Even if he goes the bipartisan route and succeeds, the end result could be comparatively modest: Perhaps fewer than 10 Senate Republicans, and perhaps not even that many in the House, party officials said. Social Security, by contrast, passed in 1935 with the support of 16 of the 25 Republican senators and 81 of the 102 Republican representatives. [...]

No less important, a partisan vote could also undercut the political legitimacy of the effort itself. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were all passed with significant support from both parties, which is one of the reasons those programs have become such an accepted part of the country's political landscape.

That's true. But when there was bipartisan support for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, we were dealing with a Congress that had Republicans who a) took electoral mandates seriously; b) were chastened by electoral defeats; and c) had plenty of moderates and pragmatists in their caucuses. That's no longer the case.

As we discussed a couple of weeks ago, it's not Obama's fault Republicans have become too conservative, failed at governing, and were punished by voters.

The question of "legitimacy" then becomes tantamount to a heckler's veto -- a small, reflexive minority can cast doubt on the credibility of everything, simply by being stubborn partisans.

Let me put this in terms even an imbecile should understand: the voters got fed up with Cons after eight years of total insanity. Given the choice between a moderate Con and a Dem, they chose the Dem. The only areas left where Cons had enough support were deep red pockets where the rabid right base outnumbered more sensible moderates, independents, and Dems. Therefore, we have a Senate comprised largely of left-of-center to centrist (or conservative) Dems versus a tiny minority comprised of raving fucking lunatics.

Have you ever tried to compromise with a lunatic? No? Head down to your local inpatient psychiatric facility and see for yourself how easy it is. Now imagine trying to negotiate with the insane people when they're not medicated. Now you have a good idea as to why we shouldn't expect bipartisanship to happen any time soon.

And it really doesn't seem like Americans are expecting bipartisanship to work, either:

It seems like everytime I get on the Internets or turn on the teevee, someone's telling me how badly Obama and the Democrats are doing with health care reform and how the concerns of "moderate" Republicans should be heeded, because Americans Want A Bi-Partisan Solution.

While it's true that Obama's numbers have dipped under the weight of the seemingly-endless sausage-making on the Hill, the "concerns" of bought-and-paid-for Blue Dogs like Mike Ross and Big Health propaganda -- no one really cares what Jim DeMint or John Boehner has to say about health care. Republicans are having absolutely zero impact on the debate.

Consider: last week's ABC News poll shows Obama with a staggering 20-point lead on the GOP.

34% is Bush approval territory. And when the question is phrased differently, the irrelevance of the GOP is even more striking.

10%! And before you assume the phrasing of that question favors Obama, here's another:

10% again. So less than half of the GOP's own shrinking base trusts Republicans to fix health care.

Do you think the huge majority of people who don't trust the Cons one iota on health care reform give two tugs on a dead dog's dick about bipartisanship? I do not believe they do. So, dear Dems, stop chasing the bipartisanship mirage and get this shit done without Cons.

It's what we gave you a mandate for.