Lynching Lunacy of the Left
If you vote for a bill, but don’t co-sponsor it, you actually oppose the intent of the bill. So says a this Democrat.
This is the latest list I have – please feed me updates. Only one Democrat, all the rest are Republicans. What was Howard Dean saying about the GOP being the party of white guys? That would be 27% of the Republican Senators who refused to oppose lynching, vs. 2% of the Democrats. Enough said.
So, lets apply this logic to say, military spending for Iraq. Clearly Kerry didn’t vote for the bill or co-sponsor the bill so it goes without saying that John Kerry is opposed to funding our troops in Iraq. Same for every other Democrat, and Republican, who didn’t co-sponsor the bill. So I guess we really can call the Democrats unpatriotic and unAmerican. Glad those Democrats cleared that up for us.
If you are sarcasm impaired, the last paragraph is sarcastic. So if you write a flame in the comments based on the last paragraph you are blithering moron you will hopefully remove yourself from the gene pool shortly.
To me that second paragraph is bad satire. It even sounds like throwing the base some meat with some unrelated Kerry-bashing in an attempt to avoid the issue. But that’s just my impression, which probably has nothing to do with what actually happened.
Anyway, what _are_ your thoughts on the matter? Granted the liberal bloggers are hyping this, I still think co-sponsoring an apology-for–lynching bill should be a no-brainer. Now, if both Dems and Reps failed to do so in roughly proportional number, the obvious answer would be something like “been out of the loop”. But that’s not what happened, so what’s going on?
Markus:
It depends on what you think the next step will be.
If this was the end of the story, then I’d expect there to be unanimity.
But what if this is the basis for reparations? After all, how “sincere” could your apology be if you’re not prepared to put some money out there to back it up?
Besides, you’ve just admitted that the Senate, the highest legislative body, is implicitly responsible for allowing lynching to happen, otherwise, why apologize?
I suspect that when a reparations bill is put out there, those who voted for it, especially Republicans, will find out that their votes will be used to leverage reparations out of them.
But that’s just a suspicion.
You’d think voting for it would be a no brainer too, but some of the Dems while in the building couldn’t bring themselves to show up for the voice vote.
Hyping this is as idiotic as hyping the Bill raped Hillary and concieved Chelsea. I think both are stupid, stupid, stupid.
As for the bill itself, it is symbolic, but mostly empty. If it helps then good, but that is about it.
Oh, and Kerry did sound off on this issue, so not the Kerry bashing is not totally unrelated. And given my views on many issues are “non-Republican” calling it meat throwing to the base leaves me wondering…what base?
It’s a little embarrassing, to this white Mississippian. Our paper today had Thad Cochran explaining that he doesn’t vote to apologize for things he didn’t do. But what about his votes to apologize for the incarceration of the Japanese-Americans during WW2? Oh, that’s different; he was apologizing on behalf of the federal government, not just the Senate.
Sigh. Cochran is “the good senator” here, but that’s a relative term.
I’m so bored bashing Kerry…can we go back to bashing Paul Wellstone?
We are in the middle of a war with a bunch of jihadis trying to kill us. Our land is being overrun with illegal aliens. Our Senate, springing into action, issues an “apology” for lyching. Right. I get it. Sure. Sorry, but refusing to go along with this pandering nonsense, that does nothing for anyone, means you are “in favor” of lynching. Do the Democrats really think we buy this crap?
Sure, Scott, I wouldn’t have introduced such a measure myself. But given that it was introduced, that it was going to pass, why not add one’s name for the heck of it, especially when one’s done so on similar measures in the past?
Frankly, I was very surprised to see both Miss. senators, and much of the Deep South, pass up what looked like a cheap, easy gesture towards racial reconciliation. The very fact that they didn’t sign on, makes me more worried about our state of racial progress than I was last week.
Because it’s very difficult to see any persuasive reason other than a wish to pander to their racist constituents, whom they seem to believe are a non-negligible % of their support—and I’m confident that Cochran and Lott are keen judges of who’s voting for them, much more so than I am.
Anderson nails it, as far as I am concerned. Those senators had good reason to assume it would be reported, and its equally obvious, that the Dems will/would use it against them to a certain degree. (In that, the vote on the Iraq war is actually a good comparison case, in that those votes were used against those voting, yet the matter is much less clear cut than “apology for lynching”).
So given they’re not stupid, and they know the game, it seems reasonable to assume, that for them the benefit + cost of not co-sponsoring was higher than the benefit + cost of co-sponsoring. And I can’t think of a cost of co-sponsoring or a benefit of not co-sponsoring that isn’t related to racism, but I’d love to be pointed to something else.
RE: Lurking Observer
The spectre of reparations is IMHO just that, a scare story and a slippery slope argument. Introducing the measure would bring do so much damage to racial relations, that I can not imagine anyone caring about racial issues who would be willing to introduce such a bill. That aside, if such a bill were introduced, any position on it would be controversial and hard to justify. If someone has to justify voting against reparations, a previous vote on an apology will make that only infinetesimally harder. Talking of “leverage” in this contest is IMHO nonsense. In fact, I’d say claiming that an apology was the apropriate response but reparations are not is not particularly hard to do and even easier than having to justify a no-quarter stance on the issue.
6 of the 16 senators on that list are from the deep South, hardly “most of the senators from the deep south.”
Two of those senators are from my state of NH, hardly the hot bed of racism.
I stand corrected, JM; I guess “100% of the senators from Miss.” made a disproportionate impression on me.
Btw, re: reparations, I hate to admit finding amusing my friend’s comment:
“We’ve had reparations for years. We just called them AFDC and Medicaid.”
Just Me,
Yep, there are no racists in the Northeast. We have them all here in the South. The Boston busing riots didn’t exist and the KKK really doesn’t have its largest number of members in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
How could there be busing riots in Boston? Isn’t Boston a blue state?
Why do PROGRESSIVES spend so much time fighting battles that are over and long past?