[Politics] I've got a little more time...

[atolnon]

...on my training left over, so I'll go into this thing that I've been thinking briefly, because everyone is talking about the stimulus package and the unsurprisingly Republican response to it. By now, I'm sure everyone has taken their sides and are working with that shovel to entrench themselves before the other sides bullets mow us over, so I'll just go in for the political situation.

Matt already talked about this, but he just lurks, and he's not going to present a post on LJ about it. He mentioned it on his blog mattschmidt.blogspot.com, and he draws a link to an earlier post. We talked about this when I was back in Fairview, and he's right, but I'm surprised more people didn't see it coming. The Republicans are going fight any compromise, and they're going to try to sink every bill. It's starting here, but it certainly won't end here, and nobody should claim to be surprised.

I appreciated the overtures of bi-partisenship that the Obama administration was making and, indeed, you can play political hardball without being rude about it. After all, it's all in how you vote. But to be clear, the Republicans will take anything the Democrats give them, and they'll never conceed in inch, no matter how civil the administration is. As long as the red team doesn't conceed a single senator, they can stonewall and even if they don't, they can make life exceedingly difficult.

And they're going to.

Comments

[drbuzzkill.livejournal.com]

Interesting how when they were the majority party in congress they whined and whined and whined about 'obstructionism', and now that they're the minority party they'll happily turn around and do the same damn thing, only now it's "standing by our values" or some such bullshit.

[atolnon.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that Obama has already tried to cooperate on the bill, but without compromising it heavily, they'll continue to stonewall it.

I mean, it's politics, and the Republicans play pretty dirty. So, like, I know we're all super-surprised, right? This isn't even particularly bad, it's by-the-books politics. But it's also as hypocritical as you mentioned, there's just no getting around it except by playing hardball.

Earlier, I considered writing a post called 'kick them while they're down', which is basically just me wanting the new administration to punish the red team for losing, it's just not particularly a good idea to do so.