One GOP lawmaker [asked, rhetorically], “It’s stupid politics. The leadership is putting pressure on Members [to sustain the veto], promising to rebuild the brand. I don’t know why our guys are following [Bush] into the sea like lemmings.”
Maybe out of habit?
Carpetbagger Report also cites reports that Bush’s flying monkeys in the West Wing message shop were unpleasantly surprised when they summoned GOP congress people to the White House for spine-stiffening last week.
“We are not happy, no doubt about it,” the Republicans told Dear Leader’s message-meisters. The main cause of their discontent was the White House attack on the children’s health insurance program.
In another report, a veteran GOP strategist told a reporter:
“It’s just stunning to me … that after seven years of Republicans complaining that the president won’t use his veto, [the White House and Republican Congressional leaders] choose their big showdown to be over children’s health care. Good Lord, it probably polls at 80 percent!”
For an opposing views on GOP lemmings, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review — the newspaper owned by Richard Melon Scaife, the wealthy rightwing ideologue who funded the Arkansas Project that paid people to smear about the Clintons in the 1990s — published an editorial that offers a glimpse into the howling, soul-less darkness of the conservative mind:
The new S-CHIP, should GOP “leaders” convince more lemmings to take the plunge and override a promised presidential veto, will have the perverse effect of encouraging those already with private coverage to opt for “the government plan.”
Even more perverse — the increase is funded by a higher cigarette tax that hits the poor the hardest; the very families that S-CHIP was designed to help will be paying for families that can help themselves.
The S-CHIP 63 should be ashamed. As should be Republican “leaders” promising to make the Socialist-CHIP program veto-proof.
The word this morning is that there won’t be enough lemmings of either stripe to over-ride the president’s veto of the children’s health insurance program when the vote is held later today.
Let’s just hope voters will remember this day when they go to the ballots in November 2008.
