Per aspera ~ Re: the Imperial wardrobe

Re: the Imperial wardrobe

Published 1:49AM, Friday, 03/10/2006 in Uncategorized

“He has no political capital,” said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster. “Slowly but surely it’s been unraveling. There’s been a direct correlation between the trajectory of his approval numbers and the — I don’t want to call it disloyalty — the independence on the part of the Republicans in Congress.”

The port deal has troubled Republicans not just on the substance of the issue but also on the president’s handling of it. The White House failed to anticipate the frenzy that would be touched off by the prospect of an Arab company managing U.S. ports, and many Republicans believe that Bush exacerbated the situation with a rash veto threat.

He’s been doing shit like this the whole time, of course, but this was finally the one that made Congressional Republicans dig in their heels. Why? It’s all well and good for Al-Qaeda-enabling tyrannies to be Vital Allies in the War On Terror as long as they’re keeping their shit overseas. But putting one of those governments in charge of a portion of the United States’ own security? There’s no way anyone’s going to be able to explain that to the voters back home.

(via Americablog)

2 Responses to “Re: the Imperial wardrobe”

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1 Jennifer Mar 12th, 2006 at 4:26 pm

The Arab Ports thing reminds me of the Crazy Alan Keyes dilemma…where the only people in IL who agreed with him were also too racist to vote for him.

Republicans are (on paper) for free markets and outsourcing, right? What’s good for Business is good for America! And to paraphrase Adam Smith, if people have good business relations with us they’re not going to do anything violent to fuck it up. It totally makes sense to put that company in charge of ports management…I haven’t read the details of the deal, which I assume smacks of the same cronyism as everything this administration does, but Bush is probably in the right about this one from a philosophical perspective, and Republicans would agree with him except that the company is run by damn dirty Arabs who can’t be trusted. Ruh-roh. And if something bad DID happen, the people who approved the deal would look really, really bad.

So it’s sick and hilarious to watch it unravel, just like it was sick and hilarious to watch downstate farmers who had voted a straight Republican ticket for generations try to explain exactly why they didn’t like Alan Keyes without actually using the word “nigger.”
2 Steve Mar 13th, 2006 at 1:13 am

Which brings us back to the truism that people vote identity, not issues. On poll after poll, the majority of Americans are to the left of frickin’ contemporary Democrats on most issues. But they vote for Republicans because the Republican Party is the party of being superior to the stupid hippies and eggheads.

There is no Republican philosophy. There’s a Republican brand, but no philosophy. And for the Democrats, there isn’t even a brand.