Lessons

In his effort to hang the 400 pounds of gristle and adipose tissue that is Rush Limbaugh around the thin reed that is the Republican Party's neck, Carville attempts to impart a "history lesson". Take heed, future agitproppers:

Why surely it seems like just yesterday that Al Gore won the national popular vote in 2000 (and arguably won the popular vote in Florida too).

Limbaugh must have called for the incoming Bush administration to allocate ideas based on the proportion of election returns. I'm sure President Bush and the Republicans in Congress graciously accepted their 49.5 percent share of everything. (Note: We would be much better off right now had this actually happened.)

With 50 percent of the federal government during President Bush's term, Democrats might have reduced the deficit (a truly Clintonista idea). Wall Street might have been more heavily regulated and K Street's lobbyists might not have been running the Capitol. Democrats might have invested money into infrastructure improvements so that bridges didn't collapse or entire cities flood.

We wouldn't have spent $350 million per day in Iraq. Heck, had Democrats been able to control 50 percent of the government from 2000 to 2004, we wouldn't have even gone into Iraq in the first place. There might have been more spending on education and a fully funded No Child Left Behind Act.

Carville is absolutely correct, of course, that Limbaugh is a hypocrite's hypocrite for suddenly wishing, even vicariously, for electorally proportionate allocations, especially after two full terms of Li'l Lord 27% acting like his narrow victory over John Kerry was some sort of cloture-proof supermajority generally arrogated by third-world dictators. Limbaugh is full of shit. Count me in as being shocked.

However. One can trace much of the finance industry's ethical and mathematical collapse, its insistence on slamming the quick-fix needle of derivative scams into its beaten veins over and over again, knowing that we'd pay for the rehab, to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed most of the meaningful protections of the Glass-Steagall Act, and which passed the Senate 90-8, at a time when the Republicans had fifty-three seats in that august body.

The idea that if only the Democrats had had even a simple majority with which to counter the inept machinations of the Cheney regime is undone even by the most recent Dem-majority edition, which consistently found itself unable to stand up to the likes of Joe Lieberman, much less actual Republicans.

A lot of Carville's "might have" list may indeed have come to pass at some point, had the Democrats not been so accustomed to punting on first down. I'd have more respect for Carville if he just laid it on the line and asked aloud why exactly Republican legislators feel the urge to genuflect to a serially divorced drug abuser, and probable sex tourist, who in addition to all the moral lapses in his personal life is a pathological liar. Instead we get the usual laundry list of bien pensant whimsies about What Might Have Been, as if even a cloture- and veto-proof majority would have kept them from indulging in their usual "bipartisan" palaver.

Look, Jimbo, you won and won big. Grow a pair and tell Limbaugh and the rest of these closet-case ankle-biters to fuck off and die already, and tell the minority party what you plan to do, and if they don't want in, just make sure everyone knows the difference. Even if you're serious about "changing the tone", you still have to continue marginalizing the assholes.