Many blame the Republicans for the failure of the distasteful, but necessary, Bush Bailout the other day in the House. And surely, those spineless weasels deserve whatever blame they got. “We would have stood tall like real men, but Nancy Pelosi made fun of our penis size and we just couldn’t get it up.”
OK fuckers, find just one Republican member of Congress who will admit that’s what caused his change of heart. Just one.
It would be easier to get Sarah Palin to admit to Katie that she wants to incarcerate doctors or ban the morning-after pill; or to get Palin to admit she doesn’t want to incarcerate doctors or ban the morning-after pill.
Won’t happen.
But me, I'd just as soon blame a few Democrats. The nation is suffering from a crisis of confidence, and while this bill won’t be a panacea, it will likely loosen up the credit market and save some jobs, thereby helping turn the truly horrible into the merely miserable.
As such, the only reason grownups had to vote against the original House bill was to ensure a better one, or to save their seats.
Those marginal Democrats who voted no certainly have my absolution. Why should they sacrifice their careers when Republicans with safe seats were unwilling to step up to the plate?
But plenty of the Democrats who voted no had no such worries. Many had very safe seats. While perhaps there was only one who deserves to be carried away in a straight jacket (New York’s Jose Serrano, whose poor constituents will be the first to suffer when the failure to pass the bailout on the first vote causes a precipitous drop in New York State and City revenues), all of them should have been concerned about the possibility that their actions would ultimately result in a law which was worse, from their point of view, than the one they rejected.
Yeah, ideological fanatics like Dennis Kucinich, Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee can perhaps be forgiven for putting principle above common sense, but what excuse does moderate-liberal Steve Rothman of Fair Lawn, New Jersey have?
The fact that the bill, if rejected, would only get worse should have been apparent to any yutz who could count to 100. To make up the deficit in the House, one needed 12 more votes; where to get them?
Go left and one begged the question, could the resulting bill pass the Senate?
It takes 60 votes to bring a Senate bill to the floor; Democrats have 51, and one of those was Joe Lieberman. I won’t even bring up Bernie Sanders, who was unlikely to vote for any bailout legislation. Any bill that could bring the votes of 12 more House Democrats, plus enough others to make up for the likely Republican attrition as the bill moved left, would almost surely have endangered Senate passage, not to mention that the wearing away of even more Republican support would have given Democrats an ownership of this bill they surely had no use for.
And sure nuff, when the Senate voted on its bill, it was certainly far worse than the one which failed in the House–unnecessary (and unpaid for) tax breaks and more pork than a banquet at Greenpoint’s Polonaise Terrace; talk about making sausages–this was cholesterol laden kielbasa of the highest order. Yes, some of the pork was Democrat-friendly, but overall, the dish being served up was far more unpalatable than the one we sent back to the kitchen.
The Hippocratic Oath begins “First Do No Harm.” From a liberal point of view, those Democrats who opposed the original House bill should be taken before the Board of Medical Examiners.