Friday, January 9, 2009

Throw Us In The Terri Schiavo Patch

To continue the great chain of lefty blog agreement about an obvious matter, Amanda and Scott and ThinkProgress are absolutely correct that trying to derail Obama's appointees by bringing up their role in the Terri Schaivo case is a strategy doomed to sweet, creamy, delicious failure. Sadly, it only looks like a bunch of cranks at the Traditional Values Coalition and similar outfits are pushing this line. I doubt the Senate Republican leadership would be quite this stupid, but we can hope.

Prior to Obama, there were two (and not many more than two) moments in my young political life when I was genuinely happy with the American people for not falling for a gigantic bullshit offensive that the Republican Party had gone all in on. First, there was the Clinton impeachment. Second, there was Terri Schaivo. If this sounds like a harsh judgment of America, well, we're the country that elected and re-elected Bush, and fell for any number of Republican gimmicks along the way to our current terrible situation. But America opposed the Republicans at the fullest moment of their power on the Terri Schaivo issue (63% saying her tube should be removed, and 70% saying that the Federal Government shouldn't intervene). I'd love to see what happens when the Republicans revisit this issue at their ebb.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd also nominate the 2005 Social Security fight.

Neil Sinhababu said...

Yeah, that's a good one too. I guess I attribute somewhat more of our success there to Pelosi being badass. But the American people helped too by having the right position.

John B. said...

Bush pretty much guaranteed that he would achieve nothing significant in his second term when he blew through his political capital on the Social Security privatization fight and the Terry Schiavo fiasco. He said he was going to spend it, and he did. I don't think he ever really recovered from those two events.

BruceMcF said...

C'mon, accuracy please ... we're the country that nearly elected President Bush (which is a sad enough indictment as it is) and then probably re-elected him.

Anonymous said...

The Schiavo fiasco was at least partially caused by the base of the GOP. For years the GOP has pandered to the religous right without giving them much, mostly because the religous right wants a bunch of crazy stuff. If Bush had ignored the religous right regarding Schiavo he would have lost his base. By pandering to them he lost much of the rest of the country it is sort of a conundrum for the GOP.
Openly pander to the religous right and lose most the country or ignore the religous right and lose elections even in the deep south.