{"id":3981,"date":"2005-04-15T13:06:16","date_gmt":"2005-04-15T17:06:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/3981.html"},"modified":"2005-04-15T13:06:16","modified_gmt":"2005-04-15T17:06:16","slug":"frist-drives-to-make-toxic-environment-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/frist-drives-to-make-toxic-environment-worse\/","title":{"rendered":"Frist drives to make toxic environment worse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s see, Republicans are attacking the courts and judges, we’re on the verge of full-scale political war in the Senate over judicial nominations, and GOP officials are attending radical right-wing, anti-judiciary conferences<\/a> at which Republican activists literally embrace a Stalin-like approach to rulings with which they disagree.<\/p>\n

And how does Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) hope to ease tensions? By making things worse<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as “against people of faith” for blocking President Bush’s nominees.<\/p>\n

Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day “Justice Sunday” and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading “the filibuster against people of faith,” it reads: “The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith.” <\/p>\n

Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, that ought to help tone down the rhetoric, right? As Josh Marshall put it<\/a>, “Frist wants to cast this, literally, as a war between the believers and the unbelievers.” Quite right. I have a hunch Senate Dems aren’t going to appreciate this.<\/p>\n

We all know Frist wants to run for president, and has decided the best way to do that is to embrace the most dangerous elements in the GOP base. That’s a shame, but that’s his prerogative. Having said that, there comes a point at which Frist’s presidential ambitions literally undermine the integrity of the body he is supposed to lead. Frist has a choice — and he’s not choosing wisely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let’s see, Republicans are attacking the courts and judges, we’re on the verge of full-scale political war in the Senate over judicial nominations, and GOP officials are attending radical right-wing, anti-judiciary conferences at which Republican activists literally embrace a Stalin-like approach to rulings with which they disagree. And how does Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}