Which Is The Bigger Fiasco?

Congressional Democrats are giving every indication of having a political deathwish:

The 52-40 tally in favor of considering the ["Tomnibus" pork-barrel spending] bill was eight votes shy of the sixty required. Democrats threatened political retaliation against Republicans in November for blocking legislation that included starting a national registry for people with the neurological disease ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

“You tell [voters] that ‘I wanted to get out of Washington, I didn’t have time to do it,’ “ Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid said.

Reid cobbled together the thirty [pork-barrel spending] bills — each of which had passed the House [and almost single-handedly obstructed by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn] by large margins — into one legislative package in an attempt to overcome all of Coburn’s parliamentary obstacles at once. Coburn is opposed to creating federal programs unless other programs he considers duplicative are eliminated or reduced in scope, and he demands that new programs also contain measures of their effectiveness.

“We don’t do that in this city. We just conveniently charge it to our grandchildren,” Coburn said in debate before the vote, noting the record $482 billion deficit projected yesterday for 2009.

My memory isn't as sharp as it used to be, so some 'o you whippersnappers help me with this: Wasn't pork-barrel spending supposed to have been a big issue in the Republicans' defeat in the 2006 mid-term congressional elections?  Haven't the Democrats garishly taken the "culture of corruption" to unplumbed depths never dreamed of by GOPers while pathetically trying to conceal their graft bread & circuses?  And Dirty Harry is trying to turn that against the minority by feebly painting Republicans as the enemies of ALS-sufferers?

At least that grasping had some rudimentary demogogic content.  Look at the puerile gobbledegook to which Ali Dickbar Al-Durbini was reduced:

Rank hath its privileges, I guess.  Maybe al-Durbini can add research into the number of occasions on which "authorizing" spending didn't lead directly to ACTUAL spending to his investigation of how many American soldiers are actually similar to the Gestapo, KGB, and Pol Pot's Cambodian genociders.

Ensign Ed sagely connects the dots with another act of rank Democide, the insane Donk determination to defy over two thirds of the American people by obstructing any and all domestic energy exploration and development:

With fewer than twenty legislative days before the new fiscal year begins October 1, the entire appropriations process has largely ground to a halt because of the ham-handed fighting that followed Republican attempts to lift the moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration. And after promising fairness and open debate, Pelosi has resorted to hard-nosed parliamentary devices that effectively bar any chance for Republicans to offer policy alternatives.

“I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet,” she says impatiently when questioned. “I will not have this debate trivialized by their excuse for their failed policy.”

You know, I absolutely detest that greenstremist obscenity.  "Save the planet" from what?  How does leaving our economy at the mercy of enemy nations with dreams of conquest and twelfth-Imam-summoning apocalypses do anything for "the planet"?  How does choking off domestic access to any and all practical mass energy sources while other countries, unfettered by the environmentalist dementia afflicting nutters like Crazy Nancy, go full bore on oil exploration (Brazil) and nuclear (France), affect the "rescue of the world"?  And how does the shrill invocation of long-discredited, thirty-year-old, Jimmy Carter-era cliches in defense of a Marxist-inspired energy policy that has given the American people skyrocketing gasoline prices (and home heating oil prices to match in the coming winter) invest Speakerette Funbags with the faux moral authority to incoherently dismiss Republican attempts at opening up domestic supply as "failed policies"?

I think "the planet" is just fine.  We need to be more concerned with saving our economy and our democracy from ten-cent despots like Nancy Pelosi and the eco-zealot-dominated Democrats who would destroy both rather than commit ideological heresy.

That's no joke, folks.  To give credit where credit is due, Harry "Oil is making us sick" Reid did, ultimately, show more reasonableness than the House Hag is evidently capable of by attempting to craft a compromise with in-the-PR-driver's-seat-and-they-know-it Republicans - by offering them an extra $10 billion in pork-barrel spending! - but got shot down not only by his opponents, but also a fusillade of "friendly fire":

A group of influential Senate and House Democrats has sided with environmental groups against Reid to call exploration in new areas unnecessary.

The legislation, drafted by Reid and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), would open nearly a billion new acres off the coast of Alaska to study for drilling. It would also dramatically accelerate oil leases in the western and central Gulf of Mexico.

“I am unalterably opposed to drilling,” said Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, who cited a massive oil spill that closed nearly one hundred miles of the Mississippi River last week.

An oil spill that had nothing to do with drilling, but was the result of a tanker collision with a barge.  And, of course, we would have less need of tankers on our waterways and coasts if we utilized the vast untapped sources of petroleum off our coasts as well as the century-plus worth of oil shale deposits in the Mountain West interior.

A month ago I wrote about the Democrats' "arrogance of power".  This absolutist anti-energy stance is another dazzling example of it.  I simply cannot believe that most Democrats would be so publicly bullheaded about even making some face-saving accomodations to the public demand for more domestic energy if they believed that it could cost them the congressional majorities they retook only two short years ago.  Maybe it's that stubborn rationalistic streak of mine striking again, but it's just too logical to conclude that Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry and their comrades have not had it even occur to them that keeping their lippes firmly and securely affixed to the asses of the environmental lobby in the current political circumstances might just cost them their gavels.

And who knows?  Maybe they're right in light of this malignantly serendipitous development:

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens allegedly made false statements to cover up gifts given to him by an oil contractor seeking his help on Capitol Hill, according to a seven-count federal indictment unveiled Tuesday.

Stevens, 84, is the longest-serving Republican in the U.S. Senate and has been under investigation for more than a year, with a heavy focus on work done to his Girdwood, Alaska, ski-community house.

"We are at the very beginning of the criminal process," said Matthew Friedrich, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department Criminal Division. "Like any other criminal defendant, Senator Stevens is presumed innocent."

But not like any other Republican office-holder, all of whom will be gleefully tarred with complicity-by-party-affiliation with the Senate's "king of pork," a crown I was never aware that West Virginia's Robert "Sheets" Byrd had ever abdicated.

So despite all of the above, Ted Stevens is going to take the GOP down single-handedly and rescue the Democrats from all their self-inflicted wounds?  Politico seems to think so:

“This is very bad for the party,” a retiring Senate Republican told Politico as news of Ted Stevens’ indictment echoed across Capitol Hill on Tuesday. “The timing on this couldn’t be worse.”

One year ago today, Stevens pleaded with his Republican colleagues to “stay with me” as he rode out a Justice Department investigation and an FBI raid on his Alaska home.

Now, there’s an arrest warrant out for the 84-year-old senator. He’s been stripped of his top committee rankings. His iconic career is crumbling. His hopes for reelection are in serious doubt.

And Senate Republicans have no idea what to do about it.

It seems to me the choices are obvious: (1) circle the wagons, like House Democrats did around "Icebox Willie" Jefferson; or (2) do what they did with their and Idaho's own Larry "Wide Stance" Craig and could have done with Ted Stevens a year ago, and impotently demand that he resign.

In this case, it's pretty much irrelevant.  If Stevens had been willing to go last summer, Governor Sarah Palin could have appointed a replacement that may have been able to hold onto that seat this fall.  But he wasn't, which means Republican calls for his scalp - then or now - would have looked like just more RINOism to the base (or at least an attempt at honor/face-saving that would never be rewarded or even acknowledged), and wouldn't have slowed down the Donk/Enemy Media feeding frenzy - then or now.

Could Stevens be persuadable about "retirement" now that he's actually been taken into federal custody?  Could Stevens actually win the Alaska GOP senate primary despite being in the slammer?  That would be the only factor that could make this debacle worse than it already is, IMHO.

No matter which way you slice it, that Alaska senate seat is almost certainly history.  But can Stevensgate really outweigh this?:

Hell — otherwise known as Congress — has officially frozen over. For the first time since the 1950s, Members will skip town today for the August recess without either chamber having passed a single appropriations bill. Then again, Democrats appear ready to sacrifice their whole agenda, even spending, rather than allow new domestic energy production.

Or even a mere debate about energy. The Democratic leadership is stonewalling any measure that might possibly relax the Congressional ban on offshore drilling. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid know that they would lose if a vote ever came to the floor, and they’re desperate to suppress an insurrection among those Democrats who are pragmatic about one of the top economic issues. Behind this whatever-it-takes obstructionism is an ideological commitment to high energy prices. The rulers of the Democratic Party want prices to keep rising. …

Normally, the spending hiatus would be a useful byproduct of Congressional bickering. But in this case the shutdown is malign neglect. Surging energy prices act like a huge tax increase on the economy, since energy demand is relatively fixed over the short term. The price spike is imposing genuine hardships on middle-income and working-class voters across the country.

The Democratic leadership isn’t oblivious to this man-at-the-pump reality. But Al Gore’s vision of the apocalyptic tides of climate change perfectly expresses their mentality: Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid see soaring prices as a public good — the mechanism that will force energy enlightenment on the U.S. If anything, they think the price of gas is too low. As recently as June, the Senate debated a multitrillion-dollar carbon tax-and-regulation scheme that was designed to boost energy costs.

Not to mention, lest anybody be allowed to forget, David Oberstar's ten-cent-a-gallon gas tax hike so he and his Donk buddies can feast on even more public transit bacon, and Maxine Water's indiscrete bean-spilling that her party plans to outright nationalize the energy sector.

How can the Democrat Poliburo be this obtuse?:

This is the antithesis of dancing the limbo: not "how low can he go," but how HIGH can he go?  TEN F'ING BUCKS A GALLON isn't high enough for Ken Salazar?  Isn't he the same SOB that claimed to Coloradans in 2004 that he was a "centrist" Democrat?

How can the denizens of that party not see the jeopardy into which they have thrust their power?  Particularly when even the sadsack GOP is not only recognizing this Godsend, but not letting it go unexploited:

A permanent, government-enforced energy crisis (to go along with the permanent, government-enforced health care crisis and the permanent, government-enforced entitlements crisis and the permanent, government-enforced war crisis, etc.) versus one old geezer amongst many of whose fingers in the till are being made a partisan example.  The cynical pessimist side of me says that's a toss-up at best, and more likely the triumph of "Stevensgatepalooza".

I don't really have an optimistic side, but that aforementioned stubborn rationalism won't let go of a small ray of hope that the dark tide can be turned - at least as long as Dem rationalism remains on its indefinite vacation.