Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Go Big Or Go Home

By Charles P. Pierce on November 5, 2014

(Optional Video Accompaniment To The Rest Of This Goddamn Day) [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPXXuEel0fU ] ( see below )

DES MOINES, Iowa -- Do it, Mr. President.

Take the executive action on immigration today, when you have your press gaggle this afternoon. Make it big. Make it loud. And, yes, make them squeal. There is nothing else you could do that so effectively could force the carefully camouflaged extremism that won last night out into the open. There is nothing else you could do that so effectively could energize the fault lines underlying the Republican position on this issue. There is nothing else you could do that so effectively could call the bluffs of all those anonymous Republicans who are whispering to Luke Russert that they know they have to "govern" over the next two years. (Look at the new House over which John Boehner has to be the hall monitor. Ken Buck from Colorado, who was too extreme to elect in the previous Republican wave year, got elected. Jody Hice got elected in Georgia with 67 percent of the vote. There are other land mines out there, too. There's no governing his caucus, let alone the country.) There is nothing else you could do that so effectively could force the issue, change the narrative, charge up your stunned party, and reassert what's left of the power of your office. There is nothing else you can do.

Last night was a defeat for the idea that circumspection ever leads to anything except timidity. The president delayed taking executive action on immigration to help out Kay Hagan, Mark Pryor, and Mary Landrieu. Hagan and Pryor are out, and Landrieu is on borrowed time. Harry Reid's actual contribution to the dysfunction was to keep those same Democratic senators from having to take tough votes that might hurt them on the campaign trail. It didn't work. They all got hung with the votes they didn't take. Alison Lundergan Grimes wouldn't even say whether she'd ever voted for the president. (Kudos to whoever thought to plant that question.) Nobody was fooled. The president's party proved itself utterly unwilling to stand behind the president's policies and, therefore, the president's very real achievements. This was not clever. It was suicidal.

There really is absolutely nothing else to do. When all the cleverness and the calculation fails, and when all the political wizards have proven themselves to be fakes and charlatans, and all the conventional wisdom has proven to be the squawking of fools, principle really is all you have left.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPXXuEel0fU

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Only_Thing_Thats_Left