Three Buffoons in the midst of the silly season: Michael Moore, Tom Coburn, Ralph Nader.
We are approaching some final bouts of the silly season before the Senate passes its … er… Insurance Industry Racket Protection Act…
… Okay, you know what? I have a bit of a thought process on the acceptance / unacceptance level for that electorate segment that’s supposed to be aligned behind Obama, the Democrats, and this bill. It goes back to a discussion I’ve seen splitting the difference in definitions of “LIberal” and “Progressive”. I’ll have to… urm… blog on it.
But that’s beside the point here. We have a few buffoons that need to be mentioned. Michael Moore, for one. Michael Moore “tweeted” out a call for a boycott of the state of Connecticut if the state doesn’t pull together a serious Recall effort for Joseph Lieberman. I am not that much a fan of blind, undirected political rage. There is no such thing as a Serious Senate Recall Effort — there are no legal provisions for such a thing.
Rolling into the Senate Filibuster Cloture vote, Tom Coburn — the Junior Insane Senator from Oklahoma (Inhofe is the Senior Insane Senator from Oklahoma) asked for prayers that a Senator might not make it to the vote for cloture. Naturally, this was speculated not to be so much a general call, but a specific reference to the wheel chair bound 93 year old Senator Robert Byrd. I am one that does not think Coburn necessarily had Senator Byrd in mind when making his statement. While it just happens that Byrd is in position to fulfill Coburn’s scenario, I still think Coburn was being a general-directed ahole as opposed to a specific-directed ahole. But just for the heck of it, I’ll pull all in to the speculation: maybe he was calling for a lone activist to push Senator Byrd’s wheel chair down an icy hill? That’s the ticket!
Something worth noting, though: my inflamatory and mildly irresponsible speculation about references to lone nuts tossing down Byrd’s wheel-chair would be moot if not for a Republican Whip job that set three Republican Senators ready to stray over to the cloture vote. I don’t know if these three were the “Moderate” Republicans — and, frankly, I don’t know who the third figure of such a triumvarite would be alongside the two Maine Senators — or if there’s this ideologically but not necessarily partisan conservative with his or her own rules of Senate Decorum. Something pops up in my mind about this one, though. If they had come to that spot earlier and more definitely, the ugly pork politics of the so called “Louisiana Purchase” and the “Cornhusker Kick-back” would not have fallen into this bill. I think it is fair to blame these contortions of Health Care policy on the sheer force of the strategy that holds a firm 40 vote Filibuster block — ergo, a portion of the mildly exasperating items in this bill are the Republicans’ faults, notwithstanding the statement that “The Democrats own it!”
One last curious item, one final buffoon in addition to Michael Moore and Tom Coburn I need to mention. Ralph Nader threw himself into a bid for relevance with his two cents, lining himslef up somewhat though in supercharged manner behind statements made by Howard Dean. That’s alright, so far as it goes. The more disturbing item from Ralph Nader, and it is not his first time in stating this, was making the racial reference to Barack Obama as an “Uncle Tom”. This is sure to endear himself with someone or other, everyone and anyone — right?