The Ultimate Political No-Brainer

Friday 17 September 2010
by: William Rivers Pitt,
t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

I am beginning to strongly suspect the Democrats in Congress would vastly prefer to lose their majority status come November, rather than continue to carry the apparently onerous burden of being in charge. The number of alternate explanations for their behavior of late is becoming sparse. Sure, yeah, there are plenty of people who will tell you there isn't a dime's worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans, especially on Capitol Hill. Both parties are beholden, for the most part, to the same corporate paymasters, and so Democrats acting like Republicans is no big surprise.

But the thing is, the Democrats aren't acting like Republicans. Republicans, for all their myriad flaws and faults, always play to win. They go for the throat every time, are not shy about saying or doing whatever is required to win the day, and have a knack for turning a sound bite into a stiletto and jamming it under the fifth rib of whatever opponent happens to present themselves. When the GOP held majority control for the first six years of the George W. Bush administration - minus that little interregnum that came about when Jeffords woke up on the left side of the bed - they absolutely bulldozed the Democratic minority just about every single time they wanted something passed. You remember, right? There were little pieces of Democrat all over the place after virtually every vote. They were relentless.

Of course, the GOP eventually blew it by 2006, thanks to an avalanche of scandals and the final national realization that a dunderheaded war freak was sitting in the White House. The fact that they lost their majority control, however, didn't change the way they operated. Quite the contrary, as we have seen. They vote en masse even against legislation they approve of if it means beating the Democrats. They roll boulders into the road to thwart everything, and do so with neither shame nor remorse. I disagree with virtually every aspect of Republican philosophy, and my disagreements have gone even deeper since the GOP became the Far-Right-Teabagger-Birther-Taliban-Christian-Nutbag Party, but I will say this: if the Democrats had acted more like Republicans when they were in the minority, there would almost certainly be a lot less dead people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this country would be a lot less broke.

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