Anderson Cooper Vs. Fox News

Those patriotic Americans at Fox News are at it again.

Just because CNN's Anderson Cooper took them to task for the way they tried to attack Barack Obama, they get all defensive. I mean, really. If you can't imply that a United States Senator is working hand-in-glove with Osama Bin Laden to destroy the United States, then what's the point of having a First Amendment? Maybe Cooper doesn't like the Constitution?

So anyway, Fox News's Vice President for Media Relations, Irena Briganti, has apparently called Cooper "The Paris Hilton of TV News."

Well, can you believe that? The nerve of these people!

Personally, I think he should sue Fox News for slander.

After all, Anderson Cooper is much prettier than Paris Hilton.

Tom Moran

A Good Idea?

Michael Barone has an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal that touches on an issue that I've been concerned about myself.

I'm not exactly a supporter of Hillary Clinton's run for the presidency, even though I think she's a fine senator and would most likely be a good president.

But that's not, I would contend, the point. There's a more serious issue involved.

Consider the following: if Hillary Clinton runs and wins the 2008 election, and then is reelected in 2012, she will leave the White House on January 20, 2017. That would mean that from January 20, 1989 to January 20, 2017 -- a period of 28 years -- the White House would have been occupied by either a Bush or a Clinton.

Surely the White House is not a baton to be passed back and forth between the members of two families? At least I don't think that's what the founding fathers had in mind.

Barone makes a further point:

But keep the following in the back of your mind. George P. Bush will be eligible to run for president in 2012. Chelsea Clinton will be eligible to run for president in 2016. So will Jenna and Barbara Bush, who will turn 35 several days after the election. And Jeb Bush, who had a fine record in eight years as governor of Florida, will be younger in 2024 than John McCain will be in 2008 or Ronald Reagan was in 1984.

Frightening, isn't it?

But there is, I believe, a way out.

In the early 1950s the Republicans who controlled Congress were terrified at the idea that someday there might be another Franklin Delano Roosevelt, so they pushed through a constitutional amendment stipulating that from that point on no president could serve more than two terms (although for the purposes of getting it passed they made an exception for Harry Truman, who in theory could have run in 1952 had it not been for the fact that Truman's poll ratings were even lower than George W. Bush's are now, if you can believe that). That constitutional amendment is still in effect to this day.

I think it might need updating.

Perhaps we should have a constitutional amendment that states that from now on no member of either the Bush or Clinton families should be allowed to run for president. It would be difficult to enforce (what exactly do you mean by family, anyway -- do third cousins twice-removed count?), but I think it's worth considering. Because I don't think it's healthy for a democracy (or at least what purports to be such) for the White House to be passed back and forth between two families like a volleyball.

And while I'd be curious to see what a Chelsea Clinton administration might look like, it keeps Jenna or Barbara from getting in the White House, so I think the trade-off might be worth it.

Tom Moran

The Sound of Silence

I try not to post blog items about the loathsome Ann Coulter, but sometimes she writes something that is particularly revealing.

Or, as in this case, doesn't write something.

Here are the first two paragraphs of her January 24 column, which is ostensibly about President Bush's State of the Union speech:

It's nice to have a president who is not so sleazy that not a single Supreme Court justice shows up for his State of the Union address (Bill Clinton, January 1999, when eight justices stayed away to protest Clinton's disregard for the law and David Souter skipped the speech to watch "Sex and the City").

Speaking of which, the horny hick's wife finally ended the breathless anticipation by announcing that she is running for president. I studied tapes of Hillary feigning surprise at hearing about Monica to help me look surprised upon learning that she's running.

Notice anything odd about those two paragraphs? Besides her ongoing (and decidedly creepy) obsession with the Clintons, that is?

She then goes on for several paragraphs noting that people who are the front runner in a given presidential campaign two years out don't always end up winning the White House. True enough, but just a little off-topic under the circumstances, don't you think?

The Skanky Doodle Dandy then goes on to insult Senator James Webb, who gave an impressive rebuttal to Bush's SOTU address:

Sen. Jim Webb, who managed to give the rebuttal to President Bush's State of the Union address Tuesday night without challenging the president to a fistfight (well done, Jim!), won his election last November by portraying himself as one of the new gun-totin' Democrats.

He once opposed women in the military by calling the idea "a horny woman's dream." But — as some of us warned you — it appears that Webb has already been fitted for his tutu by Rahm Emanuel.

Webb began his rebuttal by complaining that we don't have national health care and aren't spending enough on "education" (teachers unions). In other words, he talked about national issues that only are national issues because of this country's rash experiment with women's suffrage. I guess we should all be relieved that at least Webb's response did not involve putting a young boy's penis into a man's mouth, as characters in his novels are wont to do.

He then palavered on about the vast military experience of his entire family in order to better denounce the war in Iraq. As long as Democrats keep insisting that only warriors can discuss war, how about telling the chick to butt out?

Have you figured out yet what was so odd about the column? The identity of the dog that didn't bark?

In an 863-word column, Coulter didn't mention the content of the president's speech once.

Not once.

I think that silence speaks volumes about where Bush is now, don't you think? He's such a resounding failure that even the skankiest of the right-wing lunatics can't defend him anymore.

Tom Moran

The Ethics of Impeachment

Rosie O'Donnell has called for the impeachment of the president. Now he's really in trouble.

On this morning's episode of The View, Rosie O'Donnell said that someone in Congress should call for the impeachment of George W. Bush. She meant it, if I'm reading her correctly, in a somewhat pro forma way -- as a way of making a statement of protest against the war.

But if you're going to do that, why not go all the way and actually impeach the bastard?

As I've written in here before (most notably in my somewhat less-than-totally-coherent blog item written rather hastily last night immediately after the State of the Union address), I've gone back and forth on the subject of impeaching the president. In 2005 I thought it was probably a necessity. Right after the midterm elections I thought that maybe having a Democratic Congress might be enough of a brake on this president that impeachment with only two years left to go in his term might not be necessary.

Now, as I've said, I'm not so sure. I think impeachment, depending on the events of the next few months, is now a real possibility.

I touched on this last night, but I'll say it again because it bears repeating. If the Democrats in Congress were to attempt to impeach George W. Bush, his fate would be in the hands of the senators of his own party. Republican senators abandoned Nixon, so he was forced to resign. Democratic senators stood by Bill Clinton, so he remained in office.

So that's the big question: what will Republican senators do in the event that Bush is impeached and brought to trial? How will they vote?

Keep in mind a few salient facts. The American public now no longer supports either this president or this war. And there are going to be no less than 21 Republican Senators up for reelection in 2008. If the Democrats were to snag a significant number of those seats they might be able to hold on to control of Congress for a generation. And those 21 Republican Senators know it.

Also keep in mind that a number of Republicans, in and out of Congress, actually blame George W. Bush for the loss of the Senate. They believe that if Bush had fired Donald Rumsfeld as SecDef three weeks ahead of the election, the GOP might have maintained control of the Senate. They feel betrayed.

Those 21 Senators just might have a tough decision to make in the near future. Do they remain loyal to a president whose policies have been an absolute disaster for this country and who just might cost them the majority in Congress for the next 20 years, or do they throw him overboard in an attempt to save their own political skins?

My guess is that the next six months will tell. If the situation in Iraq is markedly better by June, then the president will probably get to serve out his term. But if the situation in Iraq has deteriorated even further by then, I think you can probably count on impeachment proceedings beginning this Summer.

And Bush's fate will be in the hands of 21 men who have no reason to be loyal to him whatsoever.

Tom Moran

The Beginning of the End

I think we saw the beginning of the end of the Bush Administration tonight.

Do you think he finally gets it? Has it finally gotten through to this pathetic failure of a president that his administration is pretty much over, and that his legacy is a failed war in Iraq?

It's become obvious to this president what I've been saying about Iraq for at least a year and a half now: that we're screwed if we stay and we're screwed if we leave. Bush doesn't have a clue what to do to change the situation, so he's tossing another 20,000 troops down the rathole.

The next six months will determine, most likely, whether this troop surge will improve things or whether things will get even worse. Bush has no real plan -- his strategy is "Hold on for the next two years and after that it's Hillary's problem." And whoever wins the 2008 election is going to have the choice of being one of two former presidents: Eisenhower or Nixon.

Eisenhower inherited the Korean War from Harry Truman and got us out on six months by being ruthless enough to blackmail the president of South Korea into accepting an unsatisfactory stalemate that left 37,000 American troops in Korea to this day.

Nixon inherited the Vietnam War from Lyndon Johnson and instead of getting us out he made that war his own -- with tragic consequences.

And then there are the political possibilities to consider. There are 21 incumbent Republican senators up for reelection in 2008. The Democratic majority could become huge if the G.O.P. doesn't get its act together -- and soon.

This makes me wonder. I've thought and written about impeachment before, and one of the things that has struck me is that whether a president is removed from office depends in the final analysis on one thing: whether he can retain the support of the senators of his own party.

Might the Republican senators be willing to throw Bush to the wolves to save themselves?

Someone on Charlie Rose tonight made the point that that if there was a secret ballot in the Senate as to whether the Bush Administration should end today, Bush would not survive that vote.

I'm starting to wonder whether or not that kind of vote might actually happen one of these days -- and it won't be private.

Tom Moran

730 Days and Counting

Today is an important day. It's January 20th, which since 1937 has been the day that presidents are inaugurated. This means that exactly two years from today a new president will be sworn in.

I don't know about you, baby, but I can't wait.

There are times when I wish that we had something a little closer to a parliamentary system in this country, because a vote of no confidence would come in really handy right about now.

The only other way to get rid of Bush before January 20th, 2009 is through the consitutional expedient of impeachment. I've gone back and forth about impeachment. I've read up on the subject, given it a great deal of thought, and at times I thought it would be the best thing to do and at others (most notably right after the midterm election) I thought it might be a moot point.

Now I'm not so sure. I saw a Lyndon Larouche table set up on University Place in Greenwich Village not long ago and while I'm not a big fan of Larouche or his followers the slogan on their table not only made sense, it made me laugh.

What was the slogan? IMPEACH CHENEY FIRST.

You do realize that if Cheney was impeached and removed from office, and the Democratic Congress refused to confirm Bush's choice to replace him and then impeached Bush who would become the President of the United States?

Nancy Pelosi, that's who. She's third in line.

But chances are that's not going to happen, and we're stuck with Bush until January 20th, 2009. I don't know who the next president will be (although I've made my preference clear), but at this point it doesn't look like anyone, Republican or Democrat, could help being anything but an improvement over the morally retarded loser we have in there now.

So let's all hang on for the next two years and with any luck things will start getting better in this country.

Tom Moran

Time Warner on Life Support

Yesterday Time Warner announced a new round of layoffs: nearly 300 people, according to the New York Times. 40 people at Time magazine are getting the axe. People is losing 44 people (although the Times points out that, since seven people are being hired, the net loss is 37 jobs). All told, 172 people on the editorial side of Time Warner are being let go, as well as 117 people on the business side.

I'm a little ambivalent about all this. As someone who used to work for the company, I can empathize with what these people are going through. Time Warner was a nice place to work, once upon a time. Then Gerald Levin made the single dumbest merger in the history of capitalism and it's been downhill for the company ever since. There were people at Time who were ready to retire who literally could no longer afford to do so -- their 401(k), most of it in Time Warner stock, had lost so much of its value as a result of the merger with AOL that retirement was no longer a viable option. And then people started getting laid off because their bosses were imbeciles (their idiotic attempt to keep the Life magazine brand alive being only the most obvious example of their stupidity). It's one thing to lose your job because you deserve to -- it's quite another to have to pay for the sins of the people who ran your company into the ground while they get a golden parachute.

It's been a long time since I've worked for Time magazine -- it feels like something I did in another lifetime. And I do feel for the people who are losing their jobs. But in a way I almost feel worse for the ones who are staying, and who will no doubt be asked to pick up the slack for the people who are leaving. Right now working for Time Warner is like having a deck chair on the Titanic -- and who knows what icebergs lie ahead.

Tom Moran

The Old and the New

I had one of those quintessential New York City experiences last week.

My neighbor down the hall from me died. He died some time on Wednesday and they didn't find the body until Saturday afternoon. They didn't take him out of the apartment until Saturday night, at which point they slapped the notice on the door to the apartment that you see at left.

I was coming out of my apartment just as the cops and the people from the medical examiners office were taking him out of his apartment in a body bag. They literally dragged the corpse along the hallway (the scrape marks are still visible on the floor) and then down the stairs to the gurney that was down on the first floor. Then they managed to heave him up onto the gurney and take him out of the building.

Of course, a lot of my neighbors are speculating as to when the apartment will be rented to someone else (after it's emptied and renovated, of course), and how much the new tenant -- probably some asshole stockbroker -- will pay in rent. It's been said that the average rent on a studio apartment in Manhattan now is something like $2,000 a month, and going on the theory that you need to make 45 times a month's rent in yearly salary, that would mean that only people who make $90,000 a year and up can afford to live in Manhattan. I make considerably less than that, but then I was able to find the last cheap apartment in Manhattan over a decade and a half ago, which means that they'll probably be taking me out of this place in a bag some day.

They're building luxury condos on the Bowery and, according to Time Out New York, the lowest tip of Manhattan is "The New Downtown." The space once occupied by The Second Avenue Deli, with its now almost illegible stars on the sidewalk dedicated to the great performers of the Golden Age of Yiddish Theater on Second Avenue, is now going to be a bank. Bank branches are going up left and right in this neighborhood. Orchard Street is being demolished and high-rise condos are being built where century-old tenements used to be. Tower Records has folded and, not too long ago, Coliseum Books went under as well. Don't get me started on what's happened to 42nd Street.

The city is changing, and I'm not sure it's for the better.

It used to be that you could come to New York, find a cheap apartment in Manhattan and struggle while you tried to make it as an actor or a dancer or a painter or a writer. Not so long ago that was still true. My first Manhattan apartment, which I lived in during the Reagan Administration, cost me $365 a month: now it would probably rent for five or six times that much. I worry sometimes about the kids who come to New York today -- where the hell are they going to live? What are they going to have to do just in order to just pay the rent and survive? What if they find out that no matter what they do they can't afford it? And if Manhattan gets too expensive for anyone under fifty to live in, where are we going to get the actors and painters and writers that are the artistic lifeblood of this city?

I worry about these things, because this is a great city and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. But sometimes it seems like, in ten years, there will only be two kinds of people living in Manhattan: the rich and the homeless. No one else will be able to afford it.

Tom Moran

George W. Bush, Scapegoat

Did you catch the President on "60 Minutes" last night? I admit, I didn't, because when I turned it on some damn football game was on, and I didn't stick around to see when it would finally air.

But I did read the official CBS transcript. And I found something that I thought was very revealing.

Here's the section I found interesting:

BUSH: Yeah. [General] John Abizaid, one of the planners, said in front of Congress, you know, he thought we might have needed more troops. My focus is on how to succeed. And the reason I brought up the mistakes is, one, that's the job of the commander-in-chief, and, two, I don't want people blaming our military. We got a bunch of good military people out there doing what we've asked them to do. And the temptation is gonna find scapegoats. Well, if the people want a scapegoat, they got one right here in me 'cause it's my decisions.

Can anybody guess what I find so revealing about that statement? Come on. Think real hard.

Bush thinks that he's a scapegoat for how badly the war in Iraq is going. Now I suppose it's possible, knowing this particular commander-in-chief, that he doesn't know exactly what scapegoat means, but I suspect that he does and used the word correctly.

Here are the apposite dictionary definitions of "scapegoat":

• 2 a: one that bears the blame for others
• b: one that is the object of irrational hostility.

In other words, Bush really feels that none of this is his fault. He is either the one taking the blame for the mistakes of others or he is the object of irrational hostility. But he's not the one who should really be held accountable for what's going on over there.

In other words, he still doesn't get it. He either doesn't get or he is unwilling to admit that if this war is a complete disaster it is his fault. He is still unwilling to accept reality. He is still, after all this time, in denial about that reality.

He may not be using the same cliches that he once used (we don't hear anymore those famous words "complete the mission"), but he still thinks that we can win this war when it's been obvious for at least a year and a half that it's over and we've lost.

And he's still willing to throw 20,000 more troops down the rathole that Iraq has become as a direct result of his actions and decisions -- no matter what he thinks.

Tom Moran

Torturing Cheney

Jury selection in the trial of former administration official Lewis "Scooter" Libby begins on Tuesday, and Vice President Dick Cheney is expected to testify at the trial.

But you don't really think he's going to say anything, do you? Certainly not the truth. I mean, he'll have lawyers and everything. He'll use whatever means he can within the law to avoid telling the truth about who ordered the leaking of the name of a CIA agent to the press in order to discredit a man the adminstration thought was an opponent.

So if he's not going to talk, what do you say we help the process along a little bit?

After all, the Vice President himself has given us a template for how to deal with situations like this: if the guy won't talk, there are ways and means of persuading him that talking might be a good idea. And given that this is a CIA matter, I'm sure the CIA would be happy to use some of these methods to find out who was the one who ordered Libby to rat out one of their own, don't you think?

Some of these methods were laid out in a November 18, 2005 piece by ABC News:

1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.

2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.

3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.

4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.

5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.

6. Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?

But my personal favorite of all these techniques (which liberal pansies tend to call "torture") comes from an account of one detainee who was held in Afghanistan:

"They would not let you rest, day or night. Stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down. Don't sleep. Don't lie on the floor," one prisoner said through a translator. The detainees were also forced to listen to rap artist Eminem's "Slim Shady" album. The music was so foreign to them it made them frantic, sources said.

Ah, yes. How exquisite. How appropriate. I think a little waterboarding combined with a little Eminem would get the Vice President to open up, don't you?

It's a shame that we can't subject Cheney to the same kind of treatment he so gleefully approves of for others. I'll bet we'd find out quite a bit about the inner workings of this criminal adminstration if we could.

Tom Moran

The Passive Construction

Did you see Bush's awkward, zombified performance last night?

It was kinda embarrassing, wasn't it? Didn't you almost feel sorry for him? He looked a little like a ten-year-old boy who was sent to the principal's office for making fart noises in class.

If only 3,000 Americans and 655,000 Iraqi civilians weren't dead as a result of his idiotic decision to invade Iraq with no provocation in order to kill the guy who tried to kill his daddy, it might almost be amusing.

But it's not amusing. It's tragic. It's tragic for the Americans who have been killed and wounded, and it's equally tragic for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed as a result of this nonsensical war.

Of Bush's whole pathetic performance last night, I found one sentence particularly revealing.

"Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me."

Now, what do we notice about this particular sentence? Take a guess. Think real hard.

What's interesting is the passive construction of the sentence. Think of all the different ways that sentiment could have been stated:

• "We have made mistakes in Iraq and I take full responsibility for them."
• "I have made mistakes in the planning and execution of the war and I have to take responsibility for those mistakes."
• "I am a pathetic excuse for a president and this war is a total failure and it's all my fault and I hereby resign effective immediately."

Okay, that last one is a little bit of wishful thinking on my part.

Keep in mind that Bush also said in his speech that "It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq" when up until recently he was repeating over and over and over again that we were winning. Now, all of a sudden, we need to change our strategy.

But it's the passive construction of the sentence that strikes me as particularly revealing. It's as if what happened in Iraq had nothing to do with him or his decisions -- as if all that death and destruction just kinda happened.

William F. Buckley has made the valid point that, if we were in a parliamentary system, Bush would have been forced out of office by now. It's too bad we don't have such a thing in this country as the vote of no confidence -- Bush would be toast if we did.

20,000 troops (the "surge" of cannon fodder that Bush is planning to ship off to Iraq) are a drop in the bucket when it comes to pacifying Iraq. In order to get the job done adequately, you would need 500,000 troops -- and that's not going to happen.

This is just another inept attempt by this hapless administration to paper over the ongoing disaster that is Iraq. The new SecDef has testified in words alluding to the movie Apollo 13 that in Iraq, "failure is not an option."

I think it's too late for that. Something this president will not admit -- even as he can't admit that it's his mistakes that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in a failed war that didn't have to happen.

Tom Moran

A Blog Entry I Don't Want To Write

Imagine my writing this while heaving a deep, heartfelt sigh. Or perhaps some other kind of heaving entirely.

I didn't want to write about the so-called "feud" between Rosie O'Donnell and Donald Trump. Seriously, I really really didn't. But it's gone on for long enough that it's gotten to the point where some comments are in order.

Some context for the six or seven shut-ins who haven't heard of this story: Tara Conner, the current Miss USA, was on the verge of losing her crown over her partying and underage drinking when Donald Trump, who owns the pageant, held a press conference to announce that she would attend rehab and on that condition would be able to retain her title.

Conner was effusive in her watery thanks to Trump while the cameras clicked.

This admittedly tacky spectacle rubbed O'Donnell the wrong way and she ridiculed Trump during the "Hot Topics" segment of her ABC show "The View," where she pointed out, among other things, that a man who cheated on two of his three wives (that we know about) has no business appointing himself a moral arbiter concerning the behavior of American girls.

She also made fun of his admittedly ludicrous combover, which, while being a cheap shot, was also pretty funny.

Trump did not respond in kind. He did not try to be funny (not that's he's capable of it -- the combover notwithstanding). He responded with a barrage of crude insults that have not stopped. Every time he steps in front of a camera he's trying to think of some new insult for Rosie O'Donnell -- one of the more egregious being "degenerate."

Hmmmmmm. I wonder what he means by that?

Exactly what makes Rosie O'Donnell a "degenerate," Mr. Trump?

Rosie O'Donnell is a successful talk show host in a committed relationship and the mother of several small children. So what exactly is there about Rosie O'Donnell that makes her a degenerate?

Could it be because of the fact that she's a-- GASP! -- lesbian?

You don't really mean to imply that lesbians are degenerates, do you, Mr. Trump?

And if you didn't meant to imply that, exactly what did you mean by using that word in that context?

And why in a post-Michael Richards environment isn't the media holding Trump accountable for what is by any standard a viciously homophobic remark?

Tom Moran

The Academy of the Overrated

Recently the editors at Premiere magazine made up a list of what they consider to be the 20 Most Overrated Films of All Time. Like many if not all such lists it's incredibly flawed, so I thought I would take a minute to point out how overrated this list is.

Here's the Premiere magazine list:

1) American Beauty
2) Chicago
3) Clerks
4) Fantasia
5) Field of Dreams
6) Chariots of Fire
7) Good Will Hunting
8) Forrest Gump
9) Jules and Jim
10) A Beautiful Mind
11) Monster’s Ball
12) Moonstruck
13) Mystic River
14) Nashville
15) The Wizard of Oz
16) An American in Paris
17) Easy Rider
18) The Red Shoes
19) 2001: A Space Odyssey
20) Gone With the Wind

There are two things you notice about this list: 1) It's incredibly bottom-heavy, relying on films made in the last quarter-century or so, and: 2) There is only one foreign film on the list.

Says a lot about the editors at Premiere, doesn't it?

Some of their choices are very apt, and some don't belong on the list at all. And then there are the ones that the editors at Premiere didn't have the cinematic erudition to remember.

These are the films that don't belong on the list:

1) Fantasia
2) Nashville
3) The Wizard of Oz
4) Gone With the Wind

And these are films that probably should be on the list:

1) Lawrence of Arabia
2) Shane
3) High Noon
4) Ben-Hur
5) It Happened One Night
6) Bringing Up Baby
7) A Clockwork Orange
8) Gandhi
9) E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
10) Titanic

What are your choices for the most overrated films of all-time?

Tom Moran

Nothing Like Screwing Your Own

You gotta love this story. It's so perfect. Such a touching way to end this holiday season.

The American Spectator is reporting that GOP staffers of Republicans who lost their seats in last November's election are getting stiffed on severance packages.

And can you guess why that is? Think real hard.

The Spectator story gives the grisly details:

During the lame duck session in December, outgoing House majority leader John Boehner went to incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and negotiated what amounted to a severance package for Democrat and GOP committee and personal staff who lost their jobs due to turnover. The package was initially for two months' severance, but limited to leadership staff and some committee staff. That package was eventually expanded, and Boehner and Pelosi thought they had a deal.

But according to House leadership sources, Rep. Roy Blunt and a cohort of fiscal conservative Republicans scuttled the deal. "They claimed that they couldn't very well cave on a payout to staff and then look like hypocrites fighting a minimum wage increase," says the leadership staffer. "The problem is, we've already caved on the minimum wage increase, so this was just grandstanding."

"I can't believe our own people treated us this badly," said a staffer on Ways and Means who is out of a job. "We could have used that two months pay to at least give us a bit of peace of mind over the holidays, but they couldn't even give us that."

Now come on -- isn't that just a perfect way for the GOP to leave office? By fucking over their own people while -- and you gotta admit, the irony is just delicious -- saying that it's because they don't want to seem like hypocrites.

I think the cow's out of the barn on that one, fellas.

I like to say that entrusting the federal government to Republicans is like asking a Luddite to fix your computer, and this is about as good an example as you can find. You get the feeling that some of those screwed-over staffers are, you might say, turning blue even as we speak?

Tom Moran