A Wimper, Not A Bang

Tooling through the Cumberland Gap and travelling through southern Ohio, I was fairly confident that the GOP wouldn't let me down.

John McCain threw a temper tantrum and held up Senate business. His colleague Tom Coburn followed suit the next day, interrupting important hearings on things ranging from the threat posed by North Korea to bank reform. But by the end of the week, it seemed the air had been punched out of the GOP for now. You have to understand they just want to go home for the break.

Incredibly the Senate parliamentarian did rule twice for the GOP--on small provisions of the student loan provisions attached to the health care bill. What would have been a catastrophic situation only 48 hours before turned into a routine vote in the House, which passed the health bill again by the same margin.

There were some nice moments. Tom Coburn argued that the health care bill would give Viagra to sex offenders and pedophiles. This charge was repeated this morning in the Washington Times. Of course, he can always plug the gap if it really exists by offering a separate bill.

The Republicans objected to the ambiguity over whether congressional staffs and the executive branch would have to participate in the health exchanges. If you work back over a year, you'll remember the Republicans dared the Democrats to accept this because they thought they could show the Democrats were hypocrites. Senator Dodd immediately agreed to the clause. Unfortunately for the Republicans, the present bill contains the sloppy writing of Tom Coburn, whose amendment it was. President Obama had to weigh in to assure the Senate the executive branch will comply.

Out in Ohio I saw a television commentator saying that the executive order signed by President Obama forbidding federal funds for abortion wasn't worth the paper it was written on. Oddly enough, he may be right because the bill doesn't have any provisions allowing for the funding of abortions. The only people who felt this were the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. For all their efforts, they did manage to persuade Congressman Cao not to vote for the bill. Their only success.

The Chamber of Commerce has folded its tent right now. I'm not sure the 40 plus million to fight the Democrats in the mid-terms will materialize. The Veterans of Foreign Wars had to apologize to the Democratic congresspeople for misrepresenting the health care bill's affect on veteran medical benefits.

The Republican attorney-generals seem to show the same legal acumen of the authors of the torture memos and the anti-gay lawyers in the Proposition 8 trial. Apparently, conservative lawyers like to assert things rather than argue their position from case law. So far, I have seen no case law in their claims the healthcare bill is unconstitutional. Attorney-General Bill McCollum of Florida and present gubernatorial candidate blew it because he is compelled by Florida law to consult both parties before bringing a lawsuit against the federal government. The Georgia attorney-general faces impeachment because as a Democrat he won't bring the case at the orders of the governor. Instead Governor Perdue is creating a separate office of Attorney-General just for the purpose of this lawsuit.

The Republican failure to stop healthcare reform has led to a meltdown in party discipline. Senator Corker is now saying that " for banking reform, you don't use the same playbook as for healthcare." Ms. Lindsey Graham balks about cancelling his hearings on military healthcare and ignored the suspension of Senate business created by his own party.

It seems that the teabaggers have turned against Senator Brown of Massachusetts. He now desparately is trying to raise funds off the non-existent threat that "ultra-leftist Rachel Maddow" is going to run against him. For three consecutive days, Rachel has had to deny this on her television show. Today she took an ad out in the Boston Herald to deny it.

David Frum got canned from AEI for his piece criticizing Republican strategy on healthcare. This sparked other writers friendly to the GOP to weigh in ,attacking the party's marriage to the teabaggers. The veneer of legitimacy given to the GOP tactics by the pundits is being stripped away.

Death Threats and harassment. The other problem facing the Republicans is the rise of death threats against nearly a dozen Democratic lawmakers who voted for Health Care. The leadership only begrudgingly condemned the violence, saying that voters were angry. "Tan Man" Boehner said "Armageddon was just a word". I guess he could have said,"Armageddon is another word for nothing left to lose." But he tried to skip over his comments that the Democratic congressman from Cincinnati was a "dead man". The same congressman's family have been threated and teabaggers are aiming to hold a rally outside his house this weekend.

David Frum said that "we always thought FOX NEWS worked for us. But now we work for them." The Republicans and their corporate donors encouraged the teabaggers for the specific purpose of blocking health care reform, bank reform and the cap and trade legislation. The idea was to create a pseudo-populist movement to generate media coverage of citizen outrage over these issues. Even Dick Armey's Freedomworks, a primary sponsor of the tea parties, is backtracking over the racial hatred and anti-immigration elements of the groups. Now that they have failed dramatically to stop healthcare, the Republicans are stuck with white "flash mobs" who will generate their own backlash against the Party.

This morning the FBI arrested a man in Oklahoma, who has been texting teabaggers to start "the killing". The FBI has reported to elected officials here that they can track all these people relatively easily. While the Republican generated teabaggers are posting their demoralizing thoughts on the blogosphere, the Patriot Movement types are going into high gear. This coming month they will be holding a "Bring Your Guns to Washington" Rally just down the road from me at Ford Hunt Park. Apparently, this is the nearest they cane come to the Capitol legally. The date for the event is April 19 to commemorate the Oklahoma City bombing.

Republicans tried to create a moral equivalency between the Democratic death threats and some of their own. Eric Cantor said he had been threatened in the past for his religion--which I don't doubt-- and recently a shot was fired into his Richmond office. This being Virginia, where you can openly carry, the Richmond police found that the shot into the window at his office was fired a long distance away and just randomly landed at his office. One Republican congresswomen Jeane Schmidt played a Michael Steele-type voice threatening her. The idea is to muddy the waters about the monsters they unleased.

Karl Rove talked about the many death threats he experienced. Glenn Beck on his show talked about wearing bullet proof vests when the FBI talked to him of threats. But these guys don't quite get it. Threats against elected officials are more serious than against media types and political operatives. They are acts of sedition.

Leaders of social movements have to train their people to behave in such a way as to further their legislative or moral goals. The civil rights movement took extreme measures to foster non-violence resistance, even though many African Americans wanted to defend themselves. Eventually with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, the more extreme elements within the African American community did emerge to meet their bloody ends. Both the Republican leadership, who egged the tea party "movement" on, and the so-called leaders of these groups have a deep responsibility to control their own followers. Any casualty in the next few months is going to provoke a massive backlash and a serious crackdown by federal authorities.

I always felt these people made tremendous strategic mistakes. They did train people but their model was what they thought the "New Left" did. They honestly feel that the New Left triumphed in this country and modelled their behavior after them. They held seminars in the more radical versions of Saul Alinsky's thought, without understanding the man's own experiences, and they followed Morton Blackwell's training for conservatives to argue their case in public by out-shouting their opponents. Both aspects of organizing have negligible political effect as we have seen through the years. However, Morton's advice is good if you want to be a talk-radio host or a contributor to Fox News. It has nothing to do with persuading people to support your political agenda.

While the tea-bag concept provided some laughs for people who knew its use in the gay community, it was wholly inappropriate for a country where taxes come with representation. The direct linkage to the American Revolution only connected the group, maybe intentionally, to the militia movement. As a result the teabaggers began with the fringe movements and parties in the United States and only after a time were they being coopted by the Republicans and the corporate community. With their failure to intimidate Congress, which was their main political tactic, it will be interesting to see whether what remains is the extremist, militia core.

The next test for these people will be their April 15th protests over taxes here in Washington. I suspect we will see less enthusiasm from the average teabagger and more participation from their military wing.

As the first legislative year of the Obama Administration wraps up, you are seeing in the open the authoritarian dimension of the Republican Party. They did want President Obama to fail and they failed. They really thought in this time of national crisis they could play the same games they did during the Clinton years, when being obstructionist in a time of plenty was a political sport. The stakes are too high now and I believe this will become more self-evident to the voters as the year progresses.

The limits of Republican patriarchy are seen in this incessant tendency to lie about everything. If father lies, his authority disappears. The Republicans leadership and their media allies tried to bully President Obama this first year--teach the young, black man his place. They failed.

They remind me of the conservative parties in Germany during the rise of Hitler. They tried to use the "flash mobs" for their purposes and ended up being ruled by them.