A Whole New Ballgame
April 12, 2011 by Ben Crystal
Note to the Democrat Party: Don’t let the tears fool you. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) can play hardball, and he can bring the lumber. And there he was Friday night, with the clock ticking down on the Democrats’ incredibly ill-advised gambit, taking President Barack Obama and Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) over the wall.
While there are still I’s to dot and T’s to cross, Boehner has managed to marshal the widely disparate ranks of the Republican Party into just enough of a politically irresistible force to break the lines of the Democrats’ eminently moveable object. While fair criticisms of Boehner can be—and often are—voiced by conservatives, consider his burden in the battle which unfolded last week. While the Democrats enjoyed the placid compliance of sheep, Boehner had to herd lions.
The Republicans lack the blind devotion upon which Obama and his accomplices rely. There is no Republican Service Employees International Union (SEIU), no Republican New York Times and no Republican Michael Moore. The Democrats are about as diverse as the Farrakhan family reunion—not counting the space aliens.
But from the rank-and-file Republicans to the Tea Partiers to the Libertarians, the conservatives are fueled by something the Democrat Party neither knows, nor understands: Righteous outrage (as opposed to mere outrage).
Righteous outrage is a conservative reaction to the President’s willingness to hold military paychecks hostage to abortion-on-demand. Mere outrage is Democrat-endorsed union thugs sending death threats to Obama’s political adversaries. Righteous outrage is conservative recognition that the corpulent bureaucracy of Obamacare is to functional healthcare as so-called “anthropogenic global warming” is to actual science. Mere outrage is a shrieking liberal harpy like Representative Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) spewing out the kind of defamatory drivel which calls to mind the pedantic pabulum normally vomited up by the idiot gasbags at MSNBC:
“In ’94 people were elected simply to come here to kill the National Endowment for the Arts. Now they’re here to kill women.”
Slaughter was referring to conservative insistence that the Federal Government cease funding abortion outside extreme cases. That’s a fair stretch from Eric Cantor (R-Va.) with a high-powered rifle firing at the Des Moines Ladies’ Auxiliary while they pose for pictures in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
The sort of hubris demonstrated by Slaughter is clearly born of comfort. Democrats from safe districts have become so content that they’ve forgotten most districts are more variegated than the sorts of places which elect crooks like Representative Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) and hypocritical millionaires like Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Perhaps the Democrats’ overconfidence was born of rosy recollections of 1995. In the months following the Republican Revolution of 1994, then-President Bill Clinton’s refusal to interact with the GOP beyond “triangulating” their message led to the kind of shutdown Boehner and the GOP managed to avert Friday night. Back then, the corporate media was no less prostrate before their Democrat masters than they are now. However, the access to real information was much more limited, thereby producing a population which was far easier to fool. Most Americans still thought the nightly network news was a legitimate source, not DNC-conceived editorials masquerading as unbiased coverage.
Moreover, Clinton had something Obama will never have: Likeability. Clinton is the “buddy you love drinking with even though you know you can’t leave him alone with your wife;” whereas Obama is more of the “buddy you hate drinking with because he sneers at your beer over the rim of his white wine spritzer glass; and your wife hates him because he reminds her of your neighbor who drives a Prius and talks with his eyes closed all the time” type.
And unlike the 1995 shutdown showdown, which Clinton won, the 2011 shutdown showdown will cost the Democrats dearly. Sure, Boehner didn’t get the kind of spending cuts most conservatives were hoping for (taxpayer funding for the now-completely-exposed NPR lucked into a stay of budgetary execution); but he wrangled a widely disparate group into breaking the Democrat Party’s normally solid lines. More importantly, he forced the President and his accomplices to pitch them over the plate, where the conservative bats “took them yard.”
Boehner didn’t get $60 billion plus, but he did force a President who spends money like he’s trying out for a spot on the “Real Trophy Wives of Beverly Hills” to give up more than $30 billion. And according to Boehner’s new editorial in the USA Today, “the next fight will be about trillions, not billions.”
The conservatives are on the field. Let’s play ball!
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