Bob Novak’s Ground Rules
It’s been a while since a blatantly government-beholden article has graced earthli News, so here’s Cooperation falls apart in Senate by Robert Novak (Chicago Sun Times). I did
“The lavishly acclaimed new era of good feelings in the Senate lasted less than four days. Senators, anxious to begin another long recess, reverted to mean and brutish behavior a little after 7 p.m. Thursday when Democrats blocked an up-or-down vote on John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. So much for supposed congeniality wrought by the Republican agreement not to tamper with the filibuster. (emphasis added)”
Novak is the reporter who outed Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, and, instead of going to jail for it, gets to continue writing and working. He spends his time hammering on people like Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D) for “obsession with normalizing U.S. relations with communist Cuba” (Bolton invented a bio-weapons scare involving Cuba in 2002 out of whole cloth) and hits Sen. George Voinovich ® as “the feckless but well- meaning Ohio Republican” when he stood up for his opinion that Bolton is an asshole.
Let’s dig into the quote above (which is, by the way, only the first paragraph). The “lavish acclamations” he’s referring to were mostly coming from a right wing press delighted to see the Republicans make the Democrats bend over and grab their ankles again. The “mean and brutish” behavior he’s referring to is Senators doing the job they were elected to do in preventing John Bolton, someone described as “the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be”, from being made ambassador to the UN.
The Republicans grudgingly agreeing “not to tamper with the filibuster” refers to the recent political “loss” suffered by the right, in which they stopped trying to squash the filibuster (the attempt was burning too much political capital) in exchange for being able to push through every idiot and charlatan the President sees fit to nominate to a post in government.
A little analogy may help here. Imagine your buddy has been haranguing you to let him drive your Ferrari to Vegas (cross-country) and also to sleep with your wife. You come home one day to find him attempting rape and promise him to let him have the car if he’ll just let her go. He agrees with a savage grin and tells you he’ll be by in the morning to pick it up. When he comes back the next day, neither you, your wife, nor your Ferrari are anywhere to be found.
Robert Novak would describe you as “mean and brutish” for going back on your word.