Enemy Combatant
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Sic Semper Tyrannis
On this, the Ides of March, our Democratic Senators in particular would do well to contemplate a fullthroated return to speaking the plain, blunt truth to the American people, and begin fighting back against the GOP bombthrowers, by tossing their verbal grenades right back in their laps.
Look at it this way: If John Kerry had taken office at the beginning of last year, and performed exactly as Bush has performed since then, Republicans wouldn't bother with impeachment -- they'd have his head on a pike by now. (You think I speak metaphorically, but I don't.)
So the Dems need to realize that they've got nothing to lose; nowhere to go, but up. They might as well begin to use words like dishonorable and liar and impeachment and treason, because they've had all of them used by the GOP against them for years now, and over far more petty shit. Progressive voters -- at least the ones I talk to -- have had it up to here with triangulation and bipartisanship. Grover Norquist told us all, years ago, that "bipartisan" was just another word for "date rape." Yet Democrats in Washington show up, night after night, and drink the roofie-laced cocktail time and again!
Of course, Bush and his cohorts play the McCarthyite heads-I-win-tails-you-lose game perfectly; Anne Coulter can joke about poisoning a sitting Supreme Court Justice and nobody at the FBI blinks an eye, yet I've heard no elected DC Democrat (even Feingold) say that Bush is a danger to this country, and needs to be removed from office immediately. Because that language always gets distorted and conflated through the GOP noise machine from a call to end Bush's public life into a call to end his life, period. What I'm dying to see is some Democrat get really angry when that happens, and call it for what it is: bullshit.
Yes, Republican heads will explode in response. But they can't have it both ways anymore; for the longest time now, when it's come to political rhetoric, somehow the GOP has been allowed to be an NFL linebacker on offense, and your elderly grandmother on defense.
Wouldn't that be something, though, for a change? Between now and November, Democrats will talk simply and bluntly and mercilessly about the Republicans (and the issues), and the Republicans in turn will cry and whine and make excuses and get the vapors, and then we'll let the voters decide.
