Across the great divide

It should be evident to anyone with half a brain that our fracture is less about ideology these days and more about whose team or ox is getting gored. It is the Republican's turn to cry about U.S. interventionism, in Libya this time. Of course, only a few years ago they were castigating liberals for not standing with their President. You need a scorecard these days to keep it all straight.

Having said that, there has been some refreshing candor on the part of a few Republicans lately in explaining their positions. We are for it because they are against it, let's put ideology aside. Just an old fashioned partisan pissing contest.

A few examples. Senator Mitch McConnell last week on the Libya issue:

From Think Progress:
Speaking with reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) acknowledged that there are “clearly divisions” in the GOP over the “constitutionality” and “cost” of the Libyan campaign. However, in a moment of rare candor, McConnell noted that his colleagues might not be so quick to denounce the president if he were a Republican. Asked if he was concerned about “the isolationist streak of some in the Republican Party,” McConnell said, “There is more of a tendency to pull together when the guy in the White House is on your side”:
MCCONNELL: The only thing I can tell you at this point is that there are differences. I’m not sure that these kind of differences might not have been there in a more latent form when you had a Republican president. But I do think there is more of a tendency to pull together when the guy in the White House is on your side. So I think some of these views were probably held by some of my members even in the previous administration, but party loyalty tended to mute them. So yeah, I think there are clearly differences and I think a lot of our members, not having a Republican in the White House, feel more free to express their reservations which might have been somewhat muted during the previous administration.

Translation: We are unprincipled hypocrites but what an opportunity to get a jab in.

And there was Texas Representative Lamar Smith, who is upset with Obama. So upset that he wants to pass a bill that will hamstring the president, but only this president. His bill will forestall the administration from blocking deportation for families of U.S. citizens who are being sent to dangerous countries. Of course this is a power that he pushed for previous Republican Presidents. He sent a letter to Janet Reno in 1999, seeking the exact same authority and leniency.


According to HuffPo, Smith's bill would prevent administrative officials from granting work authorization on a discretionary basis or granting parole or issuing deferred action, except under narrow circumstances. It would also prevent Obama from canceling orders of deportation entirely and from waiving the three- and 10-year barriers to entry for men and women who have been caught illegally present in the United States.

Smith is still supportive of the White House's discretion -- so long as it's another president is living there. The HALT Act provisions would not apply "to the next president whom the American people elect."

Maybe it's just me but I don't remember a time when laws were passed that were solely intended to punish one particular President. This sort of behavior is short sighted and parochial. Naked bullshit politics.

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The other day I saw a list of the military incursions by Bush, Reagan, Bush II that never received the approval of congress and appeared to be in contravention of the War Powers Act. It was extensive. And Democrats howled at the time.  So Obama now decides to play the same game, the imperial executive. And it is just as contemptible now as it was then. Tit for tat. He might as well hire John Yoo.

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Part of me is really rooting for Michelle Bachmann. We need a Chief Executive who talks to god on a near daily basis. Plus there is a ne'erending stream of great fodder coming out of her piehole. Today she invoked the spirit of John Wayne, a native son from Waterloo, Iowa. Except for one little problem. The John Wayne from Waterloo was in reality clown/serial killer John Wayne Gacy, convicted and executed for murdering 33 young boys in 1994. John Wayne the actor, born Marion Morrison, was from Winterset. Oops!