It came as no surprise to me to hear that the GOP had chosen Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State to rebut President Obama's State of the Union. They have made it clear that they are sincere about proving to women that, well, there are Republican women. It also came as no surprise that they had chosen a women that pretty much nobody had heard of. After all, this is the bunch that delivered us Sarah Palin in 2008, and we are all appreciative of that choice. The GOP could have had another comedic coup had they chosen Michele Bachmann in 2011, but they went and let her represent the Tea Party rebuttal:
Sadly, we all were so focused on the fact that her eyes were trained, in the distance, on those aliens that only she can see that we missed her sincerely spoken words of Tea Party misinformation. I can only imagine whoever was running the GOP into the ground back then sighing with relief that instead they had gone with male robot Paul Ryan.
But the election of 2012 caused the Republican party leadership to reconsider. With the words of Todd Aiken and his subsequent loss still stinging, leaders like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana urged his fellow republicans to stop being "the stupid party." By this he meant, of course, that they should stop letting the American people know what they really think. As we have seen since then, those old white men continue to loudly fault the poor for their poverty, the undereducated for their lack of success, and women for their menstrual cycles.
What to do, what to do? The problem being that since nothing is going to convince these guys that they might be wrong, they have apparently come to the conclusion that if women were to hear one of their own speak nonsense, they might not notice that it's nonsense.
So, just as in the not-too-distance past, the GOP found Marco Rubio to talk trash about immigration and Tim Scott to defend the denial of voting rights protections, they hunted and found a woman little known nationally to speak for them.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers has a voting record any Tea Partier would be proud of. She is a strong supporter of all those rich white men, against not just the Affordable Care Act, but Medicare and Medicaid, prefers subsidies to the rich to subsidies to the poor, and opposes women's rights to medical privacy -- by which I mean abortion and contraception services. Like her brothers-in-arms, she opposes equal rights and protections for LGBT, undocumented workers, American Indians, and, let me say it again, women.
I am looking forward to hearing what Rodgers has to say tonight, although to be honest I might not be able to get through it. I am confident though that in Rodgers the GOP has found exactly what they are looking for: someone to represent the men of today's republican party.
Harry Reid has finally decided to do something about Mitch McConnell's blocking of executive branch nominees. If you were watching C-Span yesterday, you got to see McConnell have a tantrum over -- are you ready? -- the fact that Reid called the meeting for Monday, at 6 p.m.
The Minority Leader of the Senate was upset because his members would have to show up early for their work week. This despite the fact that Reid could have called the meeting for Monday at 9 a.m., which is when the normal work-week starts for lots of us who are not members of Congress.
He then followed up that impressive argument by calling Harry Reid a "liar" and Obama's recess nominees "illegal." To which Reid defended himself by saying, "Am not." Not his finest moment, granted, but this is Harry Reid, and you have to be proud of him for just taking a stand, right?
The behavior of our republican officials prove the point that bullies are cowards and whiners. Their government jobs, big salaries and short hours, great health care and paid vacation and sick leave, and quite enviable retirement benefits, including the ability to use their contacts and influence for life, only make the whining more incessant.
The 2012 election season, with its highlight the Republican National Convention, was a showcase for bullies. These are the people who steal your lunch money and then when a friend gives you half their sandwich, knock it out of your hand and call you a crybaby.
Which is what they are also demonstrating in the battle over the Farm Bill. In essence, they are stealing our tax dollars for their buddies (and themselves) in Big Agra, while knocking the food stamp dollars out of the hands of the poor. And whining the whole time.
We should be better than this. And I'm talking about those who vote these characters into office. Those who bullied their way into the health care town halls of a few years ago, even shouting down a woman in a wheelchair. The ones who would have us spend our tax dollars to build a fence and pay for yet more border patrol but gripe about public school dollars.
Who are these people? We know them. They are misinformed and afraid they are going to lose whatever they have. They put their trust in the bullies, because the bullies yell the loudest, and point the finger away from them. The bullies provide a scapegoat.
The poor, women and children, gays, minorities, immigrants. What they have in common is not that they are destroying our country. What they have in common is that they are those not in power, they are the weaker among us. They are the groups that bullies feed on.
But the LGBT among us stood up and stopped being afraid of the bullies. The immigrants who live among us, whether legal or not, are standing up so that we can see that they are essential, and can no longer be picked on. Minorities will stop letting the bullies pit them against each other, and when they unite, they will be minorities no more.
Women are beginning to fight back. We are finding our heroes, like Wendy Davis. We are beginning to see that the fight against abortion is a red herring that allows the powerful to continue to gain wealth and power while we fight among ourselves.
And the poor? Thanks to the success of bullies like Mitch McConnell, more of us than ever have joined their ranks. Which means that when we fight back, we will be formidable.
I was late coming to The West Wing, but it's one of my favorite things. So much so that I invested in the whole series on DVD. I decided that at some point I would start at the beginning and, one episode a week, I'd do it all over again.
This January was when I began to do it all over again.
Sadly, it's so many of the same issues. Gun control, campaign finance reform. Gays in the military, and in America in general, was the one bright exception.
Today I watched the episode called, "Let Bartlet Be Bartlet." It is fraught with frustration, as poll numbers drop and the press corps, the military chiefs and Congress let Jeb Bartlet know in no uncertain terms that he is just not going to make a difference.
Turns out that he hasn't been trying that hard. It turns out that winning a second term has become more important than any of the issues that made it worth running for President in the first place.
And by the end of the episode there is a rousing turning point, wherein the President and the staff of the West Wing determine that the most important thing is fighting for those ideals.
I think we're all pretty sick of politics. Of politicians saying what they think we want to hear. President Obama's poll ratings go up when he speaks his mind. The trick is not to pay attention to the poll ratings, but to keep paying attention to what is on his mind, and to keep speaking to it.
Gun control, campaign finance reform, violence against women, protecting the environment, educating our children, raising taxes to fund what our citizens need. We have seen our president step up every so often, and he gets beaten down by scandalmongers, and sometimes by his own questionable secret agendas.
Maybe it's time for that moment, where he asks himself, why am I here after all? Maybe he needs to go back and rerun those old speeches, just as I have been rerunning those episodes of West Wing. I think he too would find inspiration in those ideals spoken back when he was first running to change the country.
