Perfecting the art of the hissy fit

October 19, 2007

If you blinked you missed it, but on late Wednesday afternoon, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) tried to stir up yet another outrage against MoveOn.org. The group, along with coalition partners, unveiled the S-CHIP ad featuring 2-year-old Bethany Wilkerson. MoveOn announced that the ad would run in districts of lawmakers who voted against the bipartisan compromise measure.

Boehner said the ad was misleading, and did his level best to get everyone excited about it: “As with MoveOn’s slanderous attacks on General David Petraeus, the new ads are so misleading and disgusting they have no place in our nation’s political discourse. I call on all Members of Congress to join me in condemning this pathetic, misleading action.”

In this case, it didn’t work. No one cared. Boehner hoped to stir a new round of whining — nothing excites the right like manufactured outrage — but this one was a dud.

So, they tried again yesterday with a new faux scandal.

Rep. Pete Stark, D-California, is facing fire from Republicans for comments on the House floor Thursday suggesting Americans are dying in Iraq for President Bush’s amusement.

Sharply critical of Bush’s veto of the children’s health insurance legislation, Stark said Republicans are spending money “to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough … to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan quickly condemned the comments, saying in a statement they are “an insult to every American, Democrat or Republican.”

“The leaders of the Democrat Party, including Nancy Pelosi and their presidential candidates, need to stand up and make it clear that this kind of attack is unacceptable from any elected official,” Duncan added.

As Digby put it, “These people are going to overdose on smelling salts and phony sanctimony if they don’t watch out. It’s about once a week now, isn’t it?”

In fact, yes.

What, exactly, did Stark say, in context? Atrios ran an extended excerpt.

“First of all, I’m just amazed they can’t figure out, the Republicans are worried we can’t pay for insuring an additional 10 million children. They sure don’t care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where ya gonna get that money? You going to tell us lies like you’re telling us today? Is that how you’re going to fund the war? You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement. This bill would provide healthcare for 10 million children and unlike the President’s own kids, these children can’t see a doctor or receive necessary care. […]

“But President Bush’s statements about children’s health shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than his lies about the war in Iraq. The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up. In Iraq, in the United States and in Congress.”

Intemperate? Sure. Worth having a hissy fit over? Probably not.

But it had been days since the Republican machine has coordinated to whine about something they’d heard some liberal say, so they seized on this one fairly quickly. CNN ran with it, as if Stark’s comments were an important development in the debate, and conservative news outlets treated this like a real story.

Sigh.

Look, occasionally political figures and officials are going to say intemperate things. Does the right have to go into high dudgeon every time this much? Republicans end up looking rather hysterical, as if their delicate sensibilities and virgin ears can’t bear to hear a Democrat say a discouraging word. Maybe it’s time the GOP grew up a little, and reserved their outrage for truly offensive comments. People stopped listening to the boy who cried wolf, after all.

Indeed, just this week, Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey compared U.S. officials to Nazis, and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) accused Democratic lawmakers of treason, saying Dems are “desperately against allowing our intelligence agencies to fight” Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Dems didn’t throw a hissy fit; CNN didn’t find it noteworthy; and no one got hysterical.

It’s as if Republicans have decided that they can’t govern, so they’ll perfect the fine art of whining. It’s rather unbecoming, but I guess they need to play to their strengths.

i’m not so sure i’d even consider his comments to be “intemperate”. they sound right on to me……….

but then i’m just one of them dirty hippies who hates america. 🙂

  • Intemperate? Sure.

    How about truthful? Or honest?

    Too many people are complaining about how the Democrats are caving to the Republicans and unwilling to take any risk in standing up to the Republicans, and when someone does, you call their statement extreme?

    It’s time that the truth be told about the Republicans, they are responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people and robbing our treasury in the process. Compared to the Republicans actions, that statement is mild and we need to get behind the Democrats when they stand up to the criminal Republicans.

  • I found Pete Starks’s comments to be refreshingly honest – sometimes angry people go a little over-the-top, but sometimes you have to to let people know just how much something gets to you. As far as I’m concerned, we need far more people standing up in the Congress and calling bullshit on these Republican hypocrites – and having a hissy fit over Stark is probably an attempt to stem a tsunami of it.

    Someone needed to get visibly and rhetorically angry and put the cost of S-CHIP and the cost of this failed war side-by-side, and demand that those cheerleading for the war explain why they aren’t wringing their hands over that cost. Maybe someone should have pointed out – to both sides of the aisle – that S-CHIP could easily have been funded if they’d given up some of the pork they manage to justify year after year after year.

    The truth is, there would have been objections to this program even if the government was drowning in cash; the core opposition was rooted not in the funding, but in the horror of having a government program that (1) works and (2) helps people. Oh, and the horror of some insurance company missing out on an opportunity to gouge people who can’t afford it. Such a worthy cause, that.

    I’m sick of the John Boehners working themselves up into phony hysteria over people they don’t really give a rat’s ass about; maybe we need to send a carton of pearl necklaces for the GOP hysterics, so they will have something to clutch the next time they feel the vapors coming on.

  • It’s about time someone said. Good on Stark, let’s hope many more follow his lead (if only to hear Rush turn bright crimson on the radio).

  • They only whine who sit in wait…

    The right rails in favor of civility when they’re not calling people faggots… and traitors… and unamerican… and baby killers… and atheists… and …and…

    Oh, yeah… hypocrites.

  • Why not just drive them to apoplexy? Every Congressional Dem should open his or her remarks, no matter what the subject, with “George W. Bush is the worst President ever.”

    Either Republicans’ heads will finally explode or the press and public will get snivel-fatigue. I’m telling you, it’s a win-win.

  • Anne is correct. It’s high time someone began to compare the amount of money being wasted on this clusterfuck and what it could buy here in the US. I’ve long thought that talking about the “cost effectiveness” of this war would be even better than talking about the political reasons behind it.

  • Why the fuck shouldn’t people get angry? If I were an American, I’d be furious, no, enraged beyond apoplexy.

    This need to be polite and “responsible” is almost past. Say what needs to be said. Do what needs to be done. Call a steaming pile of shit, a steaming pile of shit.

    What amazes me is that the Dem leadership forgot the first rule of being a gentleman and that is knowing when it’s the time not to be one.

  • Intemperate, and illogical. Who is going to be president when children grow to military age? I don’t know, but Pete Stark is sure whoever it is will be amused.

    The bit about “blowing up innocent people” is a bit off the mark. Most of the innocent people we kill are shot, not exploded. Afghan wedding parties excluded.

  • This is what happens when the media keeps feeding ignorant people horseshit from people with no credibility. They haven’t learned one damn thing, and they’re still feeding us bullshit like “Iran has said they will attack Israel, and they’re building a nuclear bomb”.

    People who don’t read enough, wingnuts in particular, believe that crap, and their leaders in Washington play off those beliefs, forcing exactly this kind of debate. Should we waste billions in Iraq and thereby shortchange our own kids? Hell no. But a lot of Americans think Iraq attacked us and that they’ll come here if we leave Iraq. Obviously this is insane. Everyone with any credibility knows that. But that toxic meme sits there in the middle of the debate, sucking the oxygen out of the room.

    The Republicans are only able to play this game because we have a large percentage of the population who think that anyone who opposes wasting money in Iraq is actually helping the enemy. And they believe that because our media sucks ass.

    If our media would just tell the truth instead of shilling for the corporations, the Republicans wouldn’t be able to play the vapor card. Hell if they would have done their job we wouldn’t be here having this conversation.

    But their job, apparently, is to make money, not tell anyone what’s really going on. And of course the best way to make more money is to get your criminal buddies to help reduce competition…

    The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

    Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the commission, wants to repeal the rule in the next two months — a plan that, if successful, would be a big victory for some executives of media conglomerates.

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/18/163250/39

  • It is only in a dictator-feudal society that the serfs are “taxed” for the benefit of the lords and nobles, who pay NO taxes.

    To me, the difference is very simple. In a Democracy, citizens are taxed to initiate and maintain programs that benefit them, not a warmongering would-be dictator’s bloodlust.

  • Say what you want about Stark’s little tirade — and personally I think it would be to Democrats’ advantage in general to try and keep their wits about and avoid making caricatures of themselves (that’s the political media’s job, after all). But I just have to believe that at the end of the day, taking medicine from babies is not going to play well for Republicans and all the bluster and indignation they can muster up isn’t going to change that. They’ve just about have to bleed for this one no matter how badly Democrats screw up on the PR side.

  • I know it is an unpopular thing to say on this blog but

    Pete Stark was wrong to say what he said. He should say he was wrong and explain to everyone what he really meant to say in clear simple English.

    Don’t defend a misteak.

    Admit your words were not the best and change them.

    defending what Pete Stark said is counterproductive, period.

  • Welcome to the Republican paradox: touch macho dudes who just go to their fainting couches when criticized.

  • The problem is, the right’s faux indignation tantrums work. The stories always appear on the cable talk circuit, the hosts condemn the intemperance, and wishy-washy Dems agree that the latest atrocity truly was over the top.

    The Republicans know how to fight, and the Democrats don’t, and they get drubbed every time. Every single day liberals are excoriated for being traitors, un-American, dirty socialists, godless commies and cowardly pacifists, and nobody even blinks.

  • Why was Pete Stark’s angry statement “wrong”? Was it the statement that blowing Iraqi heads off was for Bush’s “amusement”? Somehow I can’t stop thinking about Bush’s mockery of Karla Faye Tucker’s plea for clemency before her execution. Given his jeering, he must have found THAT amusing, so why not killing Iraqis?

    ….conservative commentator Tucker Carlson interviewed Bush for Talk Magazine (September 1999, p. 106). Excerpt from this interview is quoted below:

    In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, a number of protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Karla Faye Tucker. “Did you meet with any of them?” I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. “No, I didn’t meet with any of them”, he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. “I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with Tucker, though. He asked her real difficult questions like, ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?'” “What was her answer?” I wonder. “‘Please,'” Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, “‘don’t kill me.'” I must look shocked — ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel — because he immediately stops smirking.

    Bush denied Carlson’s allegations. No other witness coroborates Carlson’s story. (Wikipedia)

  • The Dim-Dems only have a ‘one’ punch, not a ‘one-two’ punch. The Rethugs fight dirty, and in depth. Until the political boxing match has better matched contenders the Rethug hypocrites win every time. Logic and moderation have nothing to do with it. When the brain dead media finally ignore the whining, and the Dim-Dems finally figure out how to fight (don’t hold your breath) maybe then the curtain will ring down on this disgusting circus.

  • Hark – You are soooo right.

    Gore lost because the Dems wanted a concensus and the Rep wanted to win.
    That’s why armies beat collectives every time. Orders are given and carried out – not discusses for the edification of the politically correct.

    We need to stop giving up the high ground and start calling out the truth.

    As Churchill said: Sometimes it is not good enough to do our best, sometimes we must do what’s required.

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  • To be precise, the troops are not dying for Bush’s amusement; they are dying for Bush’s ego.

  • The Democrats caused this. It’s like giving in to your three year old at the grocery store. Anyone who has ever had small children knows that giving into tantrums only makes the tantrums worse. They let the Republicans get away with their whining about the Betray Us ad, and now, like the toddler-brained morons they are, they think this tactic works all the time.

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