This blog post is dedicated to my self-described liberal friends who squarely blame the evil Republicans for all this country’s woes. YOU know who you are! All excerpts are from “The Senate Caves,” by Tim Dickinson, RollingStone June 12, 2008.
“Since regaining the majority in 2006, the Democrats have granted the Bush administration and big telephone companies immunity for illegal wiretapping, declared a branch of the Iranian military a terrorist organization and stuffed the recent Foreclosure Prevention Act with far more goodies for big lenders than for struggling homeowner. They also confirmed Attorney General Michael Mukasey despite his refusal to disavow torture – a move engineered by Schumer.”
Chuck Schumer (D – NY)
“Every democrat in the Senate likes to imagine himself as a friend of the middle class. But few take the delusion to the extremes of Chuck Schumer. In his book Positively American, the senator from New York writes in eerie detail of his decades-long, entirely imaginary friendship with Joe and Eileen Bailey, a non existent middle-class couple from Long Island who struggle to get by on $75,000 a year. . . But Schumer’s love of his made-up friends in the middle class didn’t stop him from championing one of the biggest tax breaks for billionaires in the history of the republic. Last year, Democrats in the House fought to close a loophole that levies a tax rate of only 15 percent – barely half what real-life versions of the Baileys pay – on hedge-fund managers who make as much as $3.7 billion a year. But when the debate reached the Senate, Schumer broke with his fellow Democrats and sided with Wall Street – inspiring the hedge-fund industry to hail him as its ‘guardian.'”
Harry Reid (D – NV)
“In a recent interview with Reid in his opulently chandeliered suite in the Capitol, I ask why the Democrats had not used their majority in the Senate to close the hedge-fund loophole. He greets the question with dead silence. When he finally speaks, he tells me something I never thought I would hear from a Democrat: that it would be wrong to single out the nation’s wealthiest investors simply because they are bilking the treasury out of billions. ‘The only difference between hedge fund operators and other folks similarly situated,’ Reid argues, ‘is that they make more money.’ . . . What Reid also failed to mention is that the real difference between hedge-fund billionaires and others ‘so situated’ is that they are the ones underwriting efforts by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee run by Schumer. . . . All told, the hedge-fund and private-equity sectors have showered the Democrats with more than $14 million this year – double what they have given Republicans.”
Nancy Pelosi (D – CA)
As speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi can bend Democrats to her will – including the likes of Rep. John Dingell, the lifelong champion of automakers whom Pelosi has muzzled in the debate over global warming. She has even been able to bring conservative “blue dog” Democrats to heel, repeatedly garnering their support for a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: It’s not right vs. left, it’s power vs. liberty. Right vs. left is an illusion and distraction from what’s most important.