Back in 1956, a young senator named John F. Kennedy published a book titled Profiles In Courage. Written by Kennedy and (mostly, according to columnist Cecil Adams) Theodore Sorensen, the tome detailed the stories of eight senators who exhibited extraordinary valor by standing up for the right thing.
Profiles in Courage won a Pulitzer the following year, and when JFK became president it became mandatory reading in public schools across the Union states, as well as some within the friendly confines of the Confederacy. It’s worth reading today, but if you’ve got a short attention span you can find out about these eight old white guys on Wiki.
Please note: I said it was worth reading today. If Ted were to come back from the grave to write a sequel, he need not transverse the River Styx. Spit out Charon’s obol, pal, your follow-up would be shorter than this very piece.
Let’s look at Oregon. A whole bunch of state senators, all Democrats, want to pass a strong climate bill, and they might have done it, too, if 11 Republican senators hadn’t walked out of the state senate chamber last week. They didn’t have the guts to stand up and vote against it, thereby branding themselves as cowardly lackeys of the Big Energy bloodsuckers. Nope; they ran away, tails between their legs, and in order to avoid being arrested by the state police many if not all left the state.
These Republicans said it would hurt jobs and raise gas prices. When they split town, they left more than 100 other bills twisting in the wind, including funding for sundry state agencies. Senator Brian Boquist said they, the state police, “would have to send bachelors and come in heavily armed.”
Really, Mr. Senator? I bet you your kids would happily crawl into your lap for promising to become a mass murder in order to defend their right to tread water until they drown.
And then there’s Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat from California and Speaker of the House. She has been blocking an impeachment inquiry that might reveal our current president is, as Bill Maher has been saying, a whiny little bitch. That may or may not be an impeachable offense, but such an inquiry likely would expose the details of stuff exposed in the Mueller Report that are impeachable offenses. She says there’s no point as the Republican-controlled Senate wouldn’t vote to remove the whiny little bitch no matter what the inquiry revealed. Maybe so. She also says that such a move would only serve to embolden the president’s “base.” That is not possible. The president could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, presumably near Trump Tower, and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters. He said so himself.
So. Really, Ms. Speaker? There is a concept known as “right and wrong” and we should know if the president is right, or if he is wrong. The inquiry is not a court of law, and nor is a trial in the Senate. But the inquiry would put most of the cards face up on the table. Of course, the president’s base wouldn’t believe it; they didn’t seem to believe him when he said he went backstage at his Miss Teen USA and ogled his share of naked youth. As he told Howard Stern,
“Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it. You know, I’m inspecting, I want to make sure that everything is good… You know, the dresses. ‘Is everyone okay?’ You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody okay?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”
Let me note he was not specifically responding to the complaints made by five of the young contestants. He was specifically referring to his rights to invade the privacy of naked females because he owns the pageant.
I doubt Ms. Pelosi finds that acceptable. But Ms. Pelosi does not want to investigate his obstruction of justice and other crimes – strictly for the sake of political expediency.
And that is simply wrong. If the Orange Skull is reelected it will be because the Democratic Party is turning into a gaggle of whiny little bitches without the courage of their convictions. Expose the guy for what he is, and let the voters decide.
Isn’t that how democracy is supposed to work?