« The Last 5 Sounds I'd Save | Main | Can't We All Just Get Along? »
July 16, 2006
Is Red Dead?
Can you tell I'm back in DC? More political posts! Woohoo! Call the neighbors! Anyway...
Back in 1994, when the Republican Revolution wrested control of the House from the Democrats, I -- like many of my friends on the Hill at the time -- was distraught. Well, angry too, but genuinely worried about what that election would mean for our country... and what it said about our voting populace. But one Democratic friend of mine had a sort of calm about him that I felt was almost unnatural. He didn't seem all that bothered by it -- and since most of my other Dem friends were chanting dirges and engaging in funeral marches, I was caught off guard by his reaction. When I asked him how he could be so calm about the transfer of power, he smiled and said, "Chris, the higher the monkey climbs the tree, the more people see his ass."
I laughed about it then and hoped he was right. It took four years for people to see Newt Gingrich's ass, but eventually he left the Congress. It took people 12 years to see Tom DeLay's ass, but that SOB is out of the Congress -- and if there's a God, he'll see DeLay in prison soon. And now, the rest of the Repulican clowns in Congress are showing major moonage.
the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that Americans by an almost 3-to-1 margin hold the GOP-controlled Congress in low regard and profess a desire to see Democrats wrest control after a dozen years of Republican rule.Further complicating the GOP outlook to turn things around is a solid percentage of liberals, moderates and even conservatives who say they'll vote Democratic. The party out of power also holds the edge among persuadable voters, a prospect that doesn't bode well for the Republicans.
I don't put it past this administration to "find" Osama bin Laden just in time for the election, or to cook up some dramatic "code orange" scare to try and use their tired old "terrorism" scare tactic to frighten voters into sticking with them. But I think people have finally begun to get sick of that pretense, and are tired of being manipulated by a fearmongering party with nothing else to offer. And that's reflected in those 3 to 1 poll numbers.
Memo to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Howard Dean: If, with odds favoring you like this and with Republicans handing you advantage after advantage and opportunity after opportunity, you still can't manage to win a majority back in Congress in November, I and my fellow Democrats will run your sorry asses out of town on a rail and cordially invite you to perform physically impossible acts upon yourselves. You have no excuses left. So offer a real alternative -- beyond just "we're not Bush/we're not Republicans" -- and win this damn thing.
