|
|
| |
CHRIS MATTHEWS, A SMART GUY, BUT AN INCURABLE YANKEE
|
|
Chris Matthews used to be the main man of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Now he hosts "Hard Ball" on MSNBC. Usually, his talk reflects his knowledge of real world politicking, and is a relief from the silly and predictable comments of the usual media commentators.
But Chris is still a Yankee, and in some ways that's incurable. He said the other day that he would often use big words to confuse Southern congressmen.
He said it worked.
Yea, right. I used that Southern accent gambit plenty on Capitol Hill. You can ALWAYS trick Yanks with it, and I was endlessly astonished at their inability to catch on.
Tennessee Senator Howard Baker was talking to North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin years ago. Ervin said, "Well, I'm just a country lawyer from North Carolina." Baker said, "Sam, you are a MAGNA CUM LAUDE graduate of the Harvard Law School."
Old Ervin leaned back and said, "Yes, Howard, but nobody will ever know it."
Least of all Chris Matthews.
I was watching while MSNBC pulled out its inside-the-beltway political expert to talk about the unique situation in the Senate. With a Bush victory, the Senate would be 50-50, with Vice President Cheney breaking the tie and making Republicans a majority. The commentator said such a thing has not happened in over a century.
Because of this novel even split, Democrats are saying they should not be treated as a minority usually is. Actually, as I pointed out earlier in Whitaker Online, the exact same situation did occur in 1953, when Vice President Nixon broke the tie in the Senate.
And in 1953, the minority was treated as the minority, just as it was in 1955, when Democrats ruled by a single vote in their turn. The old Southern senators would know that. Sam Ervin might humor Chris Matthews by acting like Chris' big words impressed him. But he, not Chris, would know the basics cold.
Not so today. Today Southern Republicans are so bound up in the beltway culture that they probably don't know this. Outside of Helms and maybe Thurmond, your Southern Republican today is just one more Republican, dumb as a brick and with the courage of a rabbit. I have often seen them ignorant of the basics, just like the Yankees.
You would do well to write your senator and remind him of 1953. Don't give the Republicans another excuse to act like a minority when they have a majority.
|
|
|
|
|
Right now, all the Democrats and Republicans are talking "what ifs" and regretting dumb moves.
The Democratic official who put in the butterfly ballots in Florida probably hates herself right now, as do millions of others in her party. "What if she hadn't done that?" is often on every Gore partisan's mind.
Most of us have been there. We loyal Confederates all have a hundred "what ifs" from the Civil War. All of us know many examples of incredible stupidity on the Confederate side, and wonder what might have happened if this or that had not happened.
"What if" and stupidity are home territory to us Confederates.
But the most extreme example of pure stupidity I am aware of in history happened almost exactly fifty nine years ago today, and it had nothing to do with today's election or with the Old Confederacy.
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. For President Roosevelt and Churchill, this was a dream come true. Roosevelt called on Congress to declare war on Germany, Italy, and Japan, all three.
But on December 8, 1941,Congress handed him a major defeat by declaring war ONLY AGAINST JAPAN.
America was mad at Japan, and wanted to fight the attackers of Pearl Harbor.
Nobody should have known better than Adolf Hitler what a major boon it would have been NOT to have to fight America. After all, he had been a front-line soldier in the German army that American power crushed in World War I.
So did Hitler do the sane thing, and thank his lucky stars that America was out to crush Japan, and not him?
No way.
On December 11, Hitler performed what was probably the biggest piece of fatal stupidity in history. After Americans had refused to make war on Germany in defiance of Roosevelt, Hitler gave Roosevelt exactly what he wanted. He declared war on the United States!
On December 11, 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States, which had refused to declare war on him. It was on that date, not in 1945, that Hitler committed suicide.
|
|
STUPIDITY CARRIES A DEATH PENALTY.
|
|
Pure stupidity killed Hitler, but it has killed a lot of others, too. The word stupidity naturally makes us think of respectable conservatives.
Robert Heinlein pointed out years ago that, "The penalty for stupidity has always been death."
When you are aware of the fact that stupidity is fatal, the blind stumbling of George W. Bush makes the hair rise up on your neck.
Let's take a look at a couple of the most recent examples of Bush stupidity in action.
George W. Bush lost many states by a hair. With just a few more resources spent getting votes they really could have gotten, Republicans would have carried all of them.
Where did all those resources go? The entire Republican Convention was devoted to getting liberal minority votes. Many millions of dollars were devoted to getting liberal minority votes. The Republican platform was made hopelessly weak on critical issues to get minority votes.
Once again, as in every other election, Republicans got no liberal minority votes. But this has been a consistent theme of moderate Republicanism for decades: they ignore the right and go after minority votes.
So Bush threw away a clear victory by going after minority votes. So what did Bush do as soon as he thought he had won?
Bush went after the minorities. Everybody was told that his first move would be to make a black woman his advisor on foreign affairs, and Colin Powell his Secretary of State.
This is just the beginning.
We all know that the one thing that respectable conservatives hunger after is a good word from the liberal media. The media have a gambit that uses that hopeless desire of Republicans to be loved by the press when an election has been as close as this one has. It is called The Unity Gambit.
The press is crying about how America has been split by this election. They are saying that, since the election was so close, the only way Bush can unite the nation is by giving in to the liberals even more than usual.
You see, in order to attain National Unity, Bush must go left. Now, it so happens that every time the media commentators recommend anything, it is always that the Republicans move left. By a strange coincidence, they tell us that National Unity after a close election requires Republicans to move left, too.
After a close, divisive election, we are told, Bush can be a True Statesman if he will just move to the left. Like every other recommendation of the national media commentators, this one says the same thing -- Republicans must ignore conservatives and move to the good old "middle of the road."
Needless to say, Bush is going all out for this promise that the national media will love him. There simply isn't anything so stupid that it doesn't work on a Bush.
|
|
|
| |
Home
| Current Articles | Article Archive | About
Bob Whitaker | Contact Bob | Links
| Privacy
Policy
|
|
|