Tuesday, June 12, 2007

That Was Dumb

About the only two people in the country who think that Alberto Gonzales should keep his job as the Attorney General are President Bush and Mr. Gonzales. Other than that, the consensus is that he’s incompetent, a toady, and, at worst, a liar and a hack.

That said, I’m still trying to figure out why the Democrats bothered to come up with this “no confidence” resolution. It was doomed to failure from the beginning, and even if it had, by some miracle, passed, it has no force of law.

It did, however, prove two things: the GOP will still come to the defense of the indefensible if they know they can score political points at the peril of the Democrats, and the Democrats have yet to learn that even when they’re in the majority they can still screw things up when they don’t plan their moves carefully.

The first move, of course, would not have been to propose the resolution in the first place. All it did was hand the GOP a very nice list of talking points for the sound bite circus and re-emphasize the idea that all the Democrats want to do is beat up on the poor minority Republicans — in spite of the glaring irony that that’s exactly what they did when they were in power.

The second move was that if they were going to go ahead with this bonehead ploy anyway, they should have counted the votes again and again to be sure they had enough to even get it past the filibuster stage before they even announced that they were going to propose the thing in the first place. Meaningless or not, having a vote like this go down without even getting past the preliminaries — and especially when it’s a personal rebuke — serves no purpose except to prove that the Democrats can’t get their shit together.

I will say this for the Democrats; it’s not easy to make a bunch of incompetent and malicious hacks look sympathetic, but they did it. That’s not exactly a talent you want to brag about.