{"id":1951,"date":"2004-04-09T21:05:09","date_gmt":"2004-04-10T01:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/04\/09\/1951.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:02","slug":"our-liberal-lion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/04\/09\/our-liberal-lion\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Liberal Lion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After a reminder from my Best Reader and also from The American Prospect<\/a>, Your Humble Blogger just spent an hour listening to Sen. Kennedy’s recent Critique of Administration Policy<\/a> at the Brookings Institution<\/a>. Well, watching and listening; C-SPAN has the video stream in its Politics and Elections<\/a> archive. For those of you (if any) who are interested in the whole thing, but would rather read than watch and listen, the texts are available<\/a> in pdf from Brookings.\n

Just for a taste, though, the final sentences:\n

This is the pattern and the record of the Bush Administration. Iraq. Jobs. Medicare. Schools. Issue after issue. Mislead. Deceive. Make up the needed facts. Smear the character of any critic. Again and again and again, we see this cynical and despicable strategy playing out. It's undermining our national security, undermining our economy, undermining our health care, undermining our schools, undermining public trust in government, undermining our very democracy. We need a change. November can't come too soon.<\/blockquote>\n

Other than the fun of hearing our Lion roar (and how many people can carry off a six-fold anaphora<\/a> twice in an hour), the thing I found most intriguing was the sense that Sen. Kennedy has a job to do, and that this administration is preventing him from doing it properly (as he sees it). What he calls the “Administration's win-at-any-price tactics” include not just real hardball negotiating, which the Senator may not like but would not be outraged by, but outright deception, as well as jettisoning what Norman Ornstein called<\/a> the norms of legislation. “The Medicare bill is a poster child for how not to write a law,” Senator Kennedy said. “Even a sausage-maker would be offended by how this law was made.” And remember, he’s been trying to improve health care policy since before Your Humble Blogger was born or thought of.\n

During the question and answer period, he complains about the Republican leadership refusing to allow a vote on the minimum wage. He describes being shut out of conference committee negotiations between the House and the Senate. During the question and answer period, he talks about the recent pension funds negotiation, five days of negotiation before finally agreeing on amounts that (it’s pretty clear) he felt were inadequate but the best that could be got. Then the White House shot it down. “The Senate doesn't work that way,” he said.\n

I try to remember, but often forget, that legislation is tough work, and that people such as Sen. Kennedy put in a lot of hours doing their jobs. They are, most of them, serious people doing serious things. And they are now working with people who are not serious, who have no concern for others, and who disregard both the way things have been done in the past and the way things will need to be done in your future. Imagine, in your own workplace, what that would be like. Yes, Our Only President’s incompetence, short-sightedness, cronyism, insularity, contempt for democracy, wrong-headedness, bad judgment, and arrogance will be felt by many others far more than by Senator Kennedy, who, after all, has a good job, fantastic health care, a safe pension, access to marvelous public transportation, education, and infrastructure, and who isn’t being bombed to smithereens. But then, much of what Our Only President does is only affecting Your Humble Blogger slightly, in pieces, reflections and indirections. It isn’t my job.\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a reminder from my Best Reader and also from The American Prospect, Your Humble Blogger just spent an hour listening to Sen. Kennedy\u2019s recent Critique of Administration Policy at the Brookings Institution. Well, watching and listening; C-SPAN has the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16989,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951\/revisions\/16989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}