Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

The party of NO

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For those of you who think that FUD is a plan, here’s Bobby Jindal on the subject:

Republican leaders chose not to draft their own comprehensive bill, focusing instead on attacking Democrats’ plans as too costly and bureaucratic. Some prominent Republicans now fear they are getting tagged as the “party of no,” and they want the GOP to offer more solutions to the nation’s health care problems.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a potential GOP presidential contender in 2012, said it’s time for Republicans “to pivot and say, in addition to emphasizing what we oppose, here are our proposals” for health care.”

However, my favorite quote is from Mitch McConnell:

…Republicans are nearly unified in opposition. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell warned that the bill the Finance Committee plans to give final approval next week would have “a dampening effect on what is already clearly a very, very difficult economic situation.”

He told reporters that Republicans have not offered their own bill because “we’re not in the majority. The majority has the responsibility to go forward.”

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  1. … no-way, no-how, nuhn-ah, not-gonna-do-it, can’t-make-me, digging my heels an holdin my breath, needer-needer-needer…

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    p>

    He told reporters that Republicans have not offered their own bill because “we’re not in the majority. The majority has the responsibility to go forward.”

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    p>Can’t make this stuff up…  

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    p>Christopher Hitchens, in a near incomprehensible piece in The Atlantic recently, writes that he is aghast that people trust John Stewart for news.  What Hitchens doesn’t realize is that Stewart doesn’t make things up either. He’s more or less just pointing out the joke that’s already there.  People laugh because the alternative, as Hitchens repeatedly demonstrates, is a profound, though somehow functional, psychosis…  

  2. … triangulation going on:

    Bloomberg joins former Republican Senate majority leader Bill Frist and former Republican secretary of health and human services Tommy Thompson. Expect Robert Gibbs to spend the next few months mentioning those three names about as often as he breathes.

    This is reminiscent of the strategy the Obama campaign employed in the closing weeks of the presidential election. Obama had run as the herald of a new, less polarized type of politics, but he didn’t have much support from prominent Republicans. So the campaign began to roll out, or emphasize, retired Republicans: Colin Powell, Jim Leach, and Lincoln Chafee among them. Obama’s advisers figured that if the current political situation was too polarized to permit bipartisanship, then they could reach backward, or maybe outward, to find Republicans who weren’t subject to its pressures. Then they used the presence of those retired, moderate Republicans to imply that more Republicans would be signing on if not for partisan pressure from the party leadership. Looks like they’re readying to run the same play on health care, and they’re helped by the fact that it’s probably correct on the merits.

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