OK. Here I am going off on the Republicans, again. But it's impossible for me not to gloat a bit at the scrambling they're doing, trying to repair their badly fractured image. They don't seem to know that what happened is that their fun-house mirror broke. We've known how out of touch they were. They just didn't know it. And their talk radio and FoxNews just reflected it all back at them -- and they believed it.
They really do have a dilemma. They tried so hard to convey an image of diversity, for example, in their convention. Their trouble is that the cameras wouldn't stay focused on the stage -- which showed a carefully selected range of skin tones and ethnicity.
But the cameras kept panning the audience, the delegates. And it was hard to spot anything but white, white, white. And we are headed for a not too distant future when white will no longer be a majority.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost in the House. They still have control of the House (but with fewer votes than before), and they may want to have more diversity in their committee chairs. But John Boehner's announcement of the 19 committee chairs for the next two years was a monotonous list: White men 19. White women 0. People of color 0.
They just didn't have anyone other than white men on the committees with experience to elevate to chair status. Oh, a few committee members, but not with any seniority. The most likely woman who could have been nominated would have to have been leap-frogged over seven men with more seniority. And you know how politicians are about their status in the pecking order.
[chuckle, chuckle] I like to give my glee the high-falutin' German name: Schadenfreude. It means pleasure in the misfortune of others.
Ralph
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Another measure of their out-of-touch-ness. The new chair of the House Science and Technology Committee is a climate change skeptic, Lamar Smith (R-TN).
ReplyDeleteThey just don't learn -- some of them anyway. James Inhofe, (R-OK) predicted, on Fox News (naturally) that the Benghazi incident "will go down as the biggest cover-up in history."
ReplyDeleteNow that is patently absurd on the face of it. Consider only Watergate, which resulted in the resignation in disgrace of Richard Nixon.
Of course, this is simply an indirect attack on President Obama, if not also a racial thing. The latter is a little hard to back up, given that Condi Rice was also black. Maybe it's the combination of black and liberal -- ie, conservative blacks are the "Uncle Tom's" while liberal blacks are the "uppity n------rs."
As to the "white male" problem of House Republicans, Boehner still had two committee chair positions to fill. So he has chosen a woman to head one of them. Thus, there "gender problem" has been "solved," as usual with a token.
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