"It's About Coalitions, Not Purity" Part Forty-Four

"The Chickens Come Home To Roost-George W. Bush's Second Term"

George W. Bush's second term began with the failure of his Social Security privatization plan to get anywhere. In Iraq, a civil war had broken out between Iraqi Sunni and Shia Muslims. Caught in the middle were American, British, and other coalition forces or their assistance groups, as well as a number of private security contractors. Bombings and killings were common, and the whole situation was a mess, as coalition forces also tried to oust al Qaeda units. On top of this, reports and photos had surfaced of various torture techniques used by Americans against prisoners in Iraq. This brought condemnation from many within the U.S., as well as from international sources. This part of the war in Iraq continued to grow in media coverage as time went on.     

On the domestic front, oil/gasoline prices surged to new highs, tapping the pocketbooks of already financially strapped Americans. The number of housing foreclosures were rising ominously, as the further movement of jobs to overseas production facilities, and the subsequent reduction in wages in some parts of the American economy, hung like a dark cloud over the country, bringing a queasy feeling about the storm that was coming. During the campaign, a story broke regarding Republican Mark Foley, a congressman from Florida. The story indicated that Foley had sent sexy messages to teenage boys who worked, or had worked, as congressional pages. Foley resigned about 5 weeks from the election, but the whole matter brought into question how much the Republican House leadership knew about Foley's activities. * Also brewing at that time were separate, but related scandals involving lobbyist and Republican contributor Jack Abramoff (and others), including deals about a casino boat company in Florida, a deal about minimum wage in the Mariana Islands (a U.S. Territory in the Pacific), Native American gambling casinos and campaign contributions. All of these matters are highly complex, but they touched several Republicans in Congress and government, as well as Republican supporters outside of government. Their complexity makes them far beyond this article, but there are many online sources, and also check your local library for books and articles. 

The 2006 midterm elections saw a major win for Democrats, as President Bush's popularity plunged, dragging down many Republicans with it, and the Republican coalition fractured to a degree. Democrats gained 31 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, 6 seats in the U.S. Senate. These Democratic victories often came at the expense of Republican incumbents, and in the Senate, Democrats took seats from Republicans in Ohio, Montana, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Rhode Island. Democrats also gained 6 governorships, as well as numerous state legislative seats, and state and local offices. Nancy Pelosi of California became the first ever woman Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

* Republicans, by this point in time, almost all of the conservative bent, had made anti-gay rhetoric a major part of their political party. Here was a Republican directly involved in gay sexual activities. At that time, Dennis Hastert was the Republican Speaker of the House. In the spring of 2016, Hastert admitted that he had molested teenage boys when he was a high school wrestling coach. He was given a prison sentence and a fine.

WORD HISTORY:
Torture-This word, distantly related to "thwart," goes back to Indo European "twork/terkw," which had the notion of "turn, twist." This gave Latin the verb, "torquere," which meant, "to twist, to bend," and its participle form, "tortus," gave Latin the noun, "tortura," which meant, "writhing, pain brought on by injury inflicted to get information or to get agreement to something." This passed into French as "torture," with the same meaning. English borrowed the word circa 1500 from French, but likely with the reinforcement of Latin itself. 

The President Learns A Lesson (Hopefully)

We're learning more details about how the current situation developed over the "stimulus bill." First, according to many stories on cable news channels, then President-Elect Obama gave Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats an outline of what he wanted in the bill to be submitted to Congress. Pelosi and others then filled in the details, that was "Mistake #1." As I noted in my previous article, a president is the leader of his/her political party. The bill needed to be fully designed by the incoming administration and the economic team that Obama had assembled up to that point. Congressional leaders needed to be put on a leash to support the president's bill when it was introduced in the House. (Again, I understand the "separation of powers," but while civics classes are nice, this is the REAL world of politics, not a classroom.)

What I don't quite understand as yet is, did Obama's economic team "sign off" on the bill that was to be introduced in the House of Representatives? Did Rahm Emanuel, a long time political insider, and the new White House Chief of Staff sign off on it? If so, he especially should have seen the potential red flags in the House bill. If neither the economic team, nor Emanuel gave their blessing to this bill, then they should have told the president of the potential pitfalls, or said, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" One way or the other, this was "Mistake #2." Legislation that has such a strong attachment to a president needs to be steered through Congress at every turn. The White House let this bill get out of their control.

Congress is filled with 535 egos; 435 in the House and 100 in the Senate. Turn them loose and you can have an absolute mess. The House of Representatives tends to be a bit more partisan than the Senate, and while Democrats included tax cuts more fervently supported by Republicans, the Democratic leaders knew all along that they did not need Republican votes for the package, as Democrats have a fairly substantial majority. By putting questionable items in the bill, like the now infamous millions of dollars for contraceptives, the Democratic leaders opened the whole bill to attack.*** In fairness, Pelosi removed certain items from the House bill, but by then the damage had been done.

President Obama made a major effort to court Republican votes, and polls show that the public likes that. Here again, however, this is not a civics lesson or camping trip where all hold hands and sing songs they know by heart. This is rough and tumble politics, as the new president has now found out. Republicans have taken a real drubbing in the last two elections, and they are looking for a way to right their sinking ship. House Democrats gave them some ammo. The adminstration virtually ceded the stage to Republicans and allowed them to focus attention on relatively small parts and shortcomings of the bill, but it certainly worked, and we in the public paid attention.+++ Republicans really have nothing to lose by making lots of noise about this bill. If the bill passes in some form, and I think it probably will, and the economy is righted within the next year or so, Democrats will get credit, and Republicans will probably not win many elections for quite some time. If it passes with most Republicans opposing it, and the economy still languishes in recession, they'll be able to claim that they were against it from the start and that Democrats are to blame, which will be true!

Now the bill is in the Senate, where at least three Republicans have announced support for a stripped down version of the House bill. While many folks, including me, have wanted the bill to be trimmed of certain things, the question now is, "Did they strip out money that was necessary?" From what has been made public, a great deal of money to aid beleaguered states has been given the ax. Further, money for education has also gone under the knife. I realize that the country will have to borrow the money for whatever amount ends up in this bill when it finally passes, but the idea that perhaps fifty to a hundred billion dollars is going to save the Republic from bankruptcy is nonsense. From various guests on CNBC (a cable business channel), the economy has taken hits to the tune of between like 15 and 20 trillion dollars in the last year or two. When you see it in those terms, 50 or 100 billion pales. Congress needs to get the silly nonsensical things out (and many Democrats agree with that) and get the bill passed and signed into law; with or without major Republican support.

*** Understand, I'm not attacking contraceptives, or lawn seed for the D.C. Mall, or any of the other provisions that have been under attack in this bill. Many or all may be worthy causes, but they didn't belong in this bill.

+++ Then again, this is how it works. Republicans showed us the nonsense.

Word History:
Thug-noun-This is an interesting word, and I'll bet you didn't know that it is NOT an original English, or even a Germanic, word, but its roots do seem to come from Indo European. It came to English from India!!! India was a British colony for a couple of hundred years, and Hindi (an Indo European language related to English much, much further down the family tree) had "thag," (I believe the "a" sound is like "ah," and thus we have the closely pronounced "thug" in English) which means "cheat, swindler." During British rule in India, there was a large gang of these "thags" who robbed and murdered their captives by strangulation. The word caught on in English. It is believed by many linguists that the Hindi word goes back to Sanskrit (an ancient Indo European language) "sthaga," which meant "cunning or fraudulent," perhaps from the verb "sthagayati," which meant "to cover, conceal." This in turn went back to Indo European "steg," which meant "cover." The "s" sound died out, or perhaps because it wasn't prominently pronounced anyway. When I mention that a sound died out, don't forget, we do it all of the time in spoken English. For example, we have "appreciate," but it is not uncommon to hear folks give the retort for a favor as, "Thanks, I 'preciate it." Further, don't forget, at one time we pronounced the "k" in a number of words like, "knock" and "knight" (the "k" sound is still pronounced in close English relative German "knock/knack" and "Knecht," which are the same words).