Letters to the Editor
Baldie McEagle
Published Letters: 992 Editor's Choice: 3
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W.E.S., I understand your point completely
[Read the article: What happened to the Senate's "60-vote requirement"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I just disagree.
A senator does not have to vote for his own castration just because the castration sentiment is in the air and on the radio. It's beyond cynicism to argue that he must.
So why should he vote for a war he disagrees with? Oh, that's an easy one, because it's a trick question. If a senator has no beliefs, he can't disagree with much. It's almost like having no balls to lose in the first place.
The Romans would have understood what it means to have a senator with no balls. Perhaps we should consider this. They were utterly sexist, of course, but still, there were good reasons for the preeminence of manly virtue in their world. It was a very rough world indeed.
Roman senators' worst fear was not of a major career setback or merely political death, though those were bad enough, but of exile, confiscation, and official murder: actual death. By the same token, the worst thing a Roman senator could do was to plot the assassination of a dictator or emperor, but for our senators, since assassination is beyond the pale as well as impossible (and therefore represents both kinds of death), the absolute worst thing is now to be caught attempting to impeach a president. (When this is true, regardless of what has come before, you know you have a dictator in place, for the very reason that impeachment is a legal and constitutional process. It was not true only 10 years ago, when we did not have a dictator.)
This is the essence of your argument: that the only thing of value possessed by a senator is his or her political life, and that it is risked more by dissent vs the president than by dissent vs the people or even vs simple decency and common sense. I admit that evidence for this is abundant, especially for those who are senior or have good prospects.
So the best proof of your argument, in other words, is that you are making it, and with a straight face. Yet it can be proven to be substantially false.
From Wikipedia:
Party Yeas Nays PRES No Vote
Republican 215 6 0 2
Democratic 81 126 0 1
Independent 0 1 0 0
TOTALS 296 133 0 3
United States Senate
Party Yeas Nays No Vote
Republican 48 1 0
Democratic 29 21 0
Independent 0 1 0
TOTALS 77 23 0
These were the votes on the Iraq war authorization. The question here is, are the people responsible for the 133 House Nays and the 23 Senate Nays still politically alive? I should think so.
So what it comes down to is that Hillary made a political calculation that turned out to be wrong on purely political grounds. Therefore, unless she believed the rhetoric and the justifications or was pro-war for other reasons, one or both of these must be true:
(1) She is a bad assessor of long-term political risk
(2) She is a bad assessor of military risks
and is therefore a very bad politician even of the cynical school.
Any way you slice it, she overestimated and outdid the cynicism of the American people and even of the American political system. She has not been substantially hurt by her vote, but you can't prove she would have been substantially hurt by voting differently, nor that she couldn't have overcome it. I have to conclude she has virtually no beliefs of any substance, at least compared with her lust for power. By no means is she the worst, but the voting record above proves there are better.
In short, Hillary faced no imperative to vote for war beyond her own---exceptional even for an American politician---greed and stupidity.
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Hmmm ...
[Read the article: What happened to the Senate's "60-vote requirement"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But it's risky. I think Hillary is more of a tactician, a counter-puncher and jabbing when there is an opening. I don't think she's a coward and if she wins we'll find out about her leadership capabilities.
She's been a US senator for a while now. Shouldn't we already know about her leadership capabilities?
I, for one, think we do.
You're suggesting that she hides her heart when she's out in the ring, and that's OK because she's out in the ring, fighting, and that's just one valid strategy when you are out in the ring fighting? And when she's king of the hill her heart will pop out onto her sleeve?
You've got a weird idea of American politics, my friend.
This is getting off-topic, but I guess I'm one of many around here who think that if and when Hillary's heart shows itself, it's as likely to have eight chambers and pump green ichor as to be red and warm and to steel itself for the hard task of ending American adventurism and authoritarianism within her term. That's a risk I won't take lightly, because it ain't my political career that's at stake.
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actually
[Read the article: What happened to the Senate's "60-vote requirement"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]McCain also failed to vote.
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I WISH
[Read the article: What happened to the Senate's "60-vote requirement"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bush were in a foxhole instead of a bubble ...
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@omooex
[Read the article: What happened to the Senate's "60-vote requirement"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I went back to your last post. I agree: the values of the parties seem to change every generation at least. Remember that Republicans carried out emancipation. 15 years ago, I found myself wondering whether the parties weren't switching places. And now, in a sense they have---though not in the way I expected.
And BOTH parties support big Big Brother government, torture, secrecy, the War of Terror, and corporatism.
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I get it
[Read the article: Dianne Feinstein -- Bush's key ally in the Senate -- to support telecom amnesty]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Republicans stand on principle; Democrats are motivated by partisanship.
This explains everything. A lone Republican in a roomful of hostile Democrats is therefore a far more heroic figure than a lone Democrat in a roomful of indignant Republicans. The same applies to a lone RINO and a lone DINO, or a stalwart pair of unlikely DINO buddies, fighting the bad guys back to back.
Fred is just being professionally objective when he sets aside the substance of the issue---after all, it's complicated, and there are always exactly two sides to any story---to remark on said dynamic.
That's his job as meta-reporter and Op-Ed editor, right? Not to report the news, but to report on the news. Don't blame the messenger. He didn't create this situation.
He merely perpetuates it.