I actually saw this column in the dead-tree edition of yesterday's Houston Chronicle, sitting in Beason's Park on the Colorado River just outside of Columbus with Sabra yesterday, and I will tell you the same thing I told her. Where the hell does E.J. Dionne get off talking about what Real Americans do and do not understand? He talks as if he has the slightest clue of what anyone outside the District of Columbia boundaries actually thinks, when the truth of the matter is that he proves himself to be just another insulated lefty journalism elitist every time he sits down at his keyboard. It'd be interesting to see how Dionne defines "Real American," too. Judging from the column, I'd bet he probably defines it as "one who voted for Obama for his promise to do his best to nationalize one-seventh of the American economy," or however much of it health care is. Going by that definition, I'd wager that less than half of the electorate comprises Real Americans. Who says modern liberals don't know how to demonize the opposition?
On a different note in the column, I got a huge kick out of this line:
Defenders of the Senate always say the Founders envisioned it as a deliberative body that would cool the passions of the House. But Sessions unintentionally blew the whistle on how what's happening now has nothing to do with the Founders' design.
And I bet you money that Dionne hasn't a clue as to why things go down so often like that in the Senate. A "deliberative body that would cool the passions of the House" is EXACTLY how the Founders envisioned the Senate, and that is exactly why they were initially not subject to popular vote. The Constitution as written specified that Senators, as representatives of the states, were to be elected by the state legislatures; it was only with the passage of the 17th Amendment in the early part of last century that they started being elected by the people, as the members of the House of Representatives are. So with that, the Senate became nothing more than a smaller version of the House, and the states as entities don't have any representatives in Washington anymore. And I would also bet you that Dionne, being the lefty that he is, thinks this is a GOOD thing, because hey, the people know best, even the ones that, as Tam so pithily put it, think "legislation proclaiming the theme song from Friends as the national anthem or Britney Spears being voted Dictator-for-Life" is a good idea. And you'll note, of course, that the health care bill recently passed by the thinnest of margins. Did Dionne really not think that would be at least one indicator of just how contentious the bill would be in the Senate? Or that the popular-vote-elected Senators would take advantage of the rules not repealed by the 17th Amendment? Once again, E.J. Dionne is being his typical naive and/or disingenuous self.
I also got a kick out of this howler earlier in the piece:
Republicans know one other thing: Practically nobody is noticing their delay-to-kill strategy. Who wants to discuss legislative procedure when there's so much fun and profit in psychoanalyzing Sarah Palin?Not to retort to third-grade-recess-level discourse, Scooter, but YOU and YOUR people started THAT shit. It's a bit late to be bitching about it now, don't you think?
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