The Specter of Richard Nixon? Really, Lamar! Alexander???
Richard “The Dick” Cheney won the “Keeper of the Flame Award” at a conflab of officials from the previous administration. Apparently, Cheney is currently huddled over a dying fire, blowing at it fervously in a desperate bid of keeping it from being extinguished.  The Dickster then lobbed attacks of the weakness of Barack Obama — the New Carter.
That’s where the previous installment of what represented the Republican Party is heading — largely restricted to foreign policy, as I don’t imagine Cheney cares all that much about domestic policy affairs. Neither did Richard “The Dick” Nixon, come to think of it. The current installment of the Republican Party, meanwhile…
We just saw a Republican Senator from Tennessee raise his q-rating by accusing Obama of having an “Enemy’s List” and employing the tactics of Richard Nixon, for Obama’s run of the mill politicking against political opposition. Overall, this is simply a matter of the Perpetual Silly Season — it is hard to take such a thing seriously. Obama, Senator Lamar! Alexander points out, is out to marginalize the National Chamber of Commerce. That is the way these things work, of course — in much the same way Dick Cheney “marginalized” President Barack Obama.
For what it is worth, the first time I noticed the claim that Obama was compiling an “Enemy’s List” was a story from the Alex Jones website (one of them) reporting on a British tabloid story claiming that former President Bill, Clinton had met with Obama, shown him the way things work in these Big Leagues, and thus Obama started drawing up his list to run down one by one. From Alex Jones’s point of view, the proof that this was true was the inclusion of Alex Jones on that list, which is interesting because I would take that as proof of the inaccuracy of such a list. Funny enough, American tabloids have been plastering Obama next to Glenn Beck, which I take to be a demographic alignment between the audience of Tier 2 tabloids and the audience of Fox News.
There is one thing about Lamar! Alexander’s voice speaking up that I can’t help but remark about. It seems that every time we hear about a Republican politicians in the Senate making noise in a new partisan line of attack (meaning the two Senators of Maine are excluded), you look up at the tv screen or down at the computer screen or newspaper, and see the geography of where he sits. “Republican Southern Senator” is a redundant phrase, except for Chuck Grassley of Iowa.
I think 2010 will see Republicans satuate the South even more, jabbing out a few “Conservative Democratic” Members of Congress in marginal seats moreso than up North which would then be more likely to recede in 2012, spurring the further regional imbalance of the political party.  It’s also instructive to look at the Senate Class of 2004, which saw several Democratic Southerners retiring and being replaced by new Republicans, and a couple of Republicans replacing retiring Republicans, and see that they’re mostly pretty safe.
The question becomes: Name the next Republican US Senator to play this type of partisan game, and name the state he (more likely than “she”) comes from.
One note about Lamar! Alexander and my placement of an exclamation mark after his first name: this was a campaign sign he waved about in his political campaigns: 2002 Senate bid, 2000 presidential bid, probably his 1996 bid. Political bids are a sort of cult of personality, and the politicians get wrapped up in declaring their name in such manners as putting exclamation marks after their first name. See also Jeb! Bush.