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Holiday Fundraiser Greatest Hits: The Eunuch Caucus
by digby
Merry Christmas Eve everyone. Thank you so much for your support for this year’s holiday fundraiser. If you’re a last minute Christmas shopper, this one’s easy:
A few years back I wrote the following post on the opening day of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing’s on the FISA controversy. People found it amusing because they assumed at first glance at the title that I was speaking of the Democrats. We were all feeling terrible frustration about the first year of President Bush’s second term and the Democrats’ ongoing inability to do anything to stop it. My point of view was that it wasn’t the Democrats who were weak, it was the Republican congress which bent over backwards to accommodate the president’s wishes, despite the fact that his agenda wasn’t exactly good for them or the institution — or the country.
Considering what’s happening now, I thought it was an interesting blast from the past:
Monday, February 06, 2006
The Eunuch Caucus
by digby
I’ve been digesting this morning’s hearings and I am dumbstruck by the totality of the Republicans’ abdication of their duty. These men who spent years running on Madisonian principles (“The essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse”) now argue without any sense of irony or embarrassment that Republican Senators are nothing more than eunuchs in President Bush’s political harem. They have voluntarily rendered the congress of the United States impotent to his power.
I’ve watched this invertebrate GOP caucus since 2000 as they submitted themselves to this lawless administration again and again, shredding every bit of self respect, every figment of institutional pride, every duty to the constitution. The look in their eyes, which is somehow interpreted as strong and defiant by the equally servile media, is actually a window to empty little men who have given up their manhood to oblige their master. The only reward they seek is unfettered access to the taxpayers money for their own use.
We are looking at fifty-five of the most powerful people in the country. Collectively the Republican Senators represent almost a hundred and fifty million citizens. And they have allowed a callow little boy like George W. Bush along with his grey Eminences Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to strip them of their consciences, their principles and their constitutional obligations. What sad little creatures, cowardly and subservient, unctuously bowing and scraping before Karl Rove the man who holds their (purse) strings and dances them around the halls of congress singing tributes to their own irrelevance at the top of their lungs. How pathetic they are.
Barry Goldwater is rolling over in his grave.
Update: Oh, and don’t get excited about Huckleberry Graham’s “tough” questions. This is his schtick. Going all the way back to the impeachment hearings, he has done this. He hems and haws in his cornpone way how he’s “troubled” by one thing or another until he finally “decides” after much “deliberation” that the Republican line is correct after all and he has no choice but to endorse it.