Home » Susan Estrich, please check your facts: single party dominance

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Susan Estrich, please check your facts: single party dominance — 26 Comments

  1. The first point I want to make is that these facts are very easy to check

    yup!!!

    AMAZINGLY so.. no?

    and i will point out to people, that since most of my posts are about facts, unknown facts, inaccuracies, propaganda.

    the easiest way to get my posts short, is get the facts right.

    so right now… there really isnt anything to say!!!

    i could expand, but thats not my point when i post.

    no ignorance here… i have to move on 🙂

  2. Actually, Neo, you did make one error I noticed. You said John Kennedy had a powerfully filibuster-proof majority in the Senate of 64-D to 36-R. Back in those days, the filibuster required 67 votes to override, not the current 60. So he didn’t have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, although it was close. The filibuster rule changed in 1975, dropping the requirement from 67 votes to 60.

  3. kcom: thanks, I’ll correct it. I knew I’d make a mistake somewhere! I actually had some recollection of some sort of change in the filibuster rule, but I was rushing and didn’t check it out. That’ll teach me. Good catch!

  4. I am not a fan of Estrich, without being able to point to exactly what it is, there’s something about her that I find a bit grating. I do like Pat Cadell who is, as far as I can tell, intellectually honest and for a former Carter pollster, surprisingly moderate.

    I would suggest that Estrich’s selective memory in regard to Carter is simply a case of ignoring his time in office because of his singular ineffectiveness. He’s an embarrassment and considered an anomaly.

    As for the prior examples you cited neo, historical provincialism is quite common nowadays, for many, anything that happened prior to their lifetimes is not only irrelevant but ‘not quite real’. Narcissism?

  5. Which reminds me of a flash from the past:
    the Zogby poll of ∅bama voters, which found out the following:

    In addition to questions regarding statements and scandals associated with the campaigns, the 12-question, multiple-choice survey also included a question asking which political party controlled both houses of Congress leading up to the election — 57% of Obama voters were unable to correctly answer that Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate.

    But Rethuglicans are those ignorant knuckle-dragging troglodytes. The Democrats are the Party of the People- those who are more knowledgeable and above average.

  6. BTW, the correct link to the Estrich article: http://www.creators.com/opinion/susan-estrich/what-went-wrong.html

    In other respects I thought it was a good opinion piece. Unlike most Democrats, Estrich gets to the meat of the real problem Obama is facing with healthcare:

    The White House is trying to treat the problem with its health care proposal as a communications problem.
    It’s not that people don’t want the plan; they just don’t know how great it is. Our fault, says the president, for not communicating more effectively.

    Not so fast.
    ….
    It’s not a communications problem. What’s gone wrong is that people see the country swimming in debt, see the jobs recovery lagging, see friends and neighbors who are not even hanging on, and they just don’t know how this administration is planning to pay for a massive health care reform effort.

  7. huxley: thanks for the link. It seems to have changed from when I first noted it.

    I agree that Estrich, as she has several times before, seems to understand the problems much better than most Democrats. She doesn’t always parrot the talking points and the spin du jour.

  8. “”there’s something about her that I find a bit grating””
    Geoffrey Britain

    I had that too. Then figured out its because she sounds just like Carol Channing 🙂

  9. there’s something about her that I find a bit grating

    yeah.. she is progressive..

    so when your not looking her mask comes off

    “If you want to put women in the White House, people have to start changing their view of what the president looks like, … We’ve had one after another handsome, white, male chief executives.”

    not much different than Van Jones and his commentary that certain people have to step down.

    So many of us had hoped that the civil system might be an alternative for some women, where the burdens were a little bit less, and cases might be easier to prove.

    [sounds honest eh?]

    Women are not required in general to be named in rape cases because of the stigmas that go with being a rape complainant, and frankly, special burdens that rape complainants often face.

    which is why guys like the one recently in the post served 4 years for no crime… and i can list tons of them. yuo see, when thsi is the way the law is skewed, you also skew outcomes.. and thats the goal… in this way, i nearly went to jail for nothing more than once.. and your guilty now until proven innocent (if your a guy)

    remember the duke guys? how come they were innocent but had their reputations destroyed. and the one that recently is now up on charges for trying to set her boyfriend on fire (a feminist burning bed thing), was protected.

    it violates the constitution to do this
    it makes some people presumptively less equal!!!

    if the alleged purpetrator gets to have his face there…
    and he is Alledgedly innocent until proven guilty, then the person seeking charges has to be exposed as well, because thats EQUAL under the eyes of the law…

    but, a woman making charges is MORE THAN EQUAL. she gets to be protected and the other is assumed guilty by this change.

    thanks estrich, thanks mackinnon

    constitutions been sidestepped by progressives again

  10. Lol Neo..And i thought i was the only one noticed the Carol Channing thing. Strange thing about human similarities. It took me 3 or 4 years to figure out this one guy i met seemed familiar simply because he walked just exactly like someone else i knew.

  11. SteveH and neo,

    By George, I think you’ve got it! Though I never disliked Channing, perhaps because she wasn’t much on my ‘radar screen’ of the movies I watched.

    Artfldgr,

    No its not that she’s a progressive, as my mention of Cadell, another progressive, demonstrates. I don’t agree with him either but he doesn’t grate on me, yet I agree with others that Estrich is sometimes quite reasonable, as she has been of late. She recognizes what Brown’s election in Mass means for instance, just as Cadell does and she gets the health care debate issue.

    On another matter, while I may have misunderstood, you appear to be denigrating the idea of women in high office. If so, I cannot agree, though I’ll preface my approval upon the caveat that for a woman to serve as President, she must be able to make the really hard decisions; sending good people into harms way knowing some or perhaps all will die with the certain result of shattered families and even orphaned children. Or making the decision to kill 100,000 Japanese men, women and children in order to save millions who would otherwise be lost.

    Tough mindedness is not a gender-dependent quality but it is absolutely a critical necessity for a nation’s leader.

  12. No defense of Carter, but stagflation was not his fault. Remember the WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons sported by the Nixon/Ford administration? Didn’t think so. But I do.

    So, who’s fault? LBJ’s. The irresponsible fiscal policy of “Guns and Butter” – Vietnam and The Great Society – severely weakened the dollar. Our European friends, in abrogation of The Bretton Wood Agreement, raided Fort Knox. This forced Nixon to close the gold window – the guarantee of an ounce of gold for $35. This was an effective devaluation of the dollar. Poor Jimmah just happened to be around for the brown blizzard.

    Communications problem? The picture comes to mind of the marketing VP at Ford who said “Maybe if we added a little chrome they’d like the Edsel”.

  13. “As for the prior examples you cited neo, historical provincialism is quite common nowadays, for many, anything that happened prior to their lifetimes is not only irrelevant but ‘not quite real’. Narcissism?”

    Hey, Geoffrey, guess what? I bet the Dems don’t even remember this, and it happened less than five years ago. I’m sure they’ll argue it’s some fancy CGI trick that Breitbart dreamed up and not real video.

    Who needs historical amnesia of events before their lifetime when instead they can pretend to forgets that happened that they were personally involved in.

  14. kcom,

    Yes. Denial and ‘amnesia’ are such wonderfully convenient things, when seeking to maintain an agenda, are they not?

    As always, for true believers, the ends always justify the means. Of course, when the ends sought threaten the constitutional and economic vitality of the republic…

  15. Roy, I remember the WIN buttons…I also remember that some wag suggested that they should be worn upside-down so as to read NIM – No Immediate Miracles…

  16. “something about her that I find a bit grating” Aside from her politics it has to be her voice. Like listening to a wood chipper…

  17. There is one big diff between then and now. Back then the Dem powers were people like Henry Jackson, Herman Talmadge, Sam Rayburn, and Dan Rostenkowski. Compare them to Henry Waxman, Barney Frank, Dick Durban, and the latest up-and-comer, Al Franken.

  18. Although the democrats had large senate majorities under JFK and Carter, many of those democratic senators were from the south, and quite conservative. On many issues, informal alliances of republicans and southern democrats blocked the liberal agenda. Although Estrich’s point is clearly wrong as stated, it IS probably true that this is the first time in her adulthood (or mine, born 1944) that liberals have had such solid control of both houses. Today the democratic party is so fully dominated by liberals, it has become quite common to project this current polarization back into the past and forget the power conservative democrats once held. Today’s democratic congressional leadership is not only liberal, it is overwhelmingly bi-costal and urban as well.

  19. Very good point Nolanimrod, the Dem party is now a hang out of impractical dreamy lefties, not the grown-ups of Scoop Jackson’s time.

  20. I continue to be surprised at the sloppiness of the supposed political experts and their sweeping allegations about history.

    Why does this continue to suprise you? US history education is poor at best, and mostly useless, or indoctrination at worst. So the typical person defaults to history begins on the day I was born and political history begins on the day I started paying attention.

    So it isn’t surprising to me that Estrich (and many of her peers) falls into the same pattern.

  21. Mike: you may be correct vis a vis lbierals, although the Carter years were fairly liberal (post-Vietnam). Right now I think the Democrats’ leaderhship in Congress is the most liberal it’s ever been. But that’s not what Estrich was saying.

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