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I'd have to sum up my immediate reaction to tonight's State Of The Union speech with the old Monty Python line: ".... and now, for something completely different ..."
With some regularity, this column excoriates the mainstream news media for all sorts of continued idiocy in the way it conducts its business. But every once in a while, we have to applaud them when they get something right. This week, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post deserves mentioning, for pledging to stay Palin-free for the month of February. Details on this in a moment.
The House of Representatives, as expected, just voted to repeal the landmark healthcare law which President Obama signed less than a year ago. This vote was a symbolic victory for Republicans, but not any sort of substantial change. To truly repeal the law, the Senate would have to also pass the bill the House just passed, and then both houses would have to muster a two-thirds majority vote to overcome Obama's veto. None of which is going to happen. Democrats still control the Senate, and Harry Reid has all but pronounced the bill "dead on arrival" in his chamber, meaning that today's House vote is the only victory (and a symbolic one, at that) Republicans should expect in their mad dash to repeal healthcare reform.
To honor the fallen this week, we're going to refrain from our usual heated political rhetoric here for a change. It's only fitting, really, after such an emotional week for America. So, just to warn everyone up front, we're not going to be heaping our usual amounts of scorn on Republicans this week. Instead, we're going to (briefly) heap some scorn on the mainstream media, and then after a foreshortened awards section, we are going to reprint the text of President Obama's moving speech in Tucson this Wednesday, for those of you who haven't had the chance to view it or read it.
Both of these urges run deep. It's part of the human condition to try to fit things into a rational framework in our minds, and to reassure ourselves that if we only had done things a little differently, we could have avoided this tragedy. The problem is, neither one of these is any sort of universal truth. Sometimes craziness happens for no reason other than mental imbalance, and sometimes it happens explosively with little warning.
In taking in the news of the 112th Congress' first new steps (especially those taken by the Republican House of Representatives), I had to wonder -- how will the Tea Party and the Tea Partiers be treated by the mainstream media, going forward? Will they still have a voice in the media's political coverage of the next two years, and what will that voice say? To put the point I'm trying to make more succinctly: will the Tea Partiers become "old news" to the media?
The newly-Republican House of Representatives is going to start off their tenure with a gimmick. Or, to be slightly more charitable, a bit of political theater. They're going to read the entire United States Constitution on the floor of the House, as a sop to the Tea Party Republicans. Their aim is twofold -- to appease the Tea Party Republican faction, right from the get-go; and to provide stirring video clips of Republicans faithfully reading our country's founding document. There's one problem with this second goal, though: who gets to read the uncomfortable bits?
Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!
My apologies to anyone tuning in who was expecting to see the 150th "Friday Talking Points" column, since it will be pre-empted for two weeks here. But the good news is we're doing so to bring you our annual "McLaughlin Awards," which are even more fun!
A theme has emerged, in recent years, of America as a nation almost hopelessly divided, politically. This theme is most often reinforced by such superlative declarations (by "journalists" who really should know better) as "America is more politically divided than ever," or "this is the most politically polarized Washington has ever been," or similar such alarmist rhetoric. It has even gotten to the point where many see such statements as truisms -- statements so obviously true that they are seen as irrefutable. This is a gross error, born of the fact that most "journalists" simply have no concept of their own country's history. Because while we are indeed currently politically divided and somewhat polarized, this is actually our normal state as a nation -- and on the polarization scale, we're nowhere near the "most divided" we've ever been. Far from it.