Narrative correctness

Why is Rand Paul's Republican Teabagger victory in Kentucky CNN's top story on the political ticker? In the home state of Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning, no amount of ideological extremism should be a surprise, and Paul's victory was so widely expected that it barely qualifies as news.

There was real news yesterday:

• Mark Critz (D-Murtha) unexpectedly beat Tim Burns (R-oops), which CNN gives one line.
  
• Joe Sestak (D-reality) ended the (elective) political career of Arlen Specter (DINO-opportunism).
• Richard Blumenthal (D-Apocalypse Now) ended his own political career.
• Bill Halter (D-semi-reality) forced Blanche Lincoln (D-subsidiary) into a runoff.
  

But CNN is wasting its pixels on teabaggers. It's not that CNN is filled with teabag sympathizers. But the "TRENDING" tag ought to be a clue.

Big media no longer wants to report what happened today. It wants to develop a story arc. That makes writing and editing easier - and laziness is the great inertial force in human behavior. But it also leads to all the really good gigs:

• Slots among the shouters on TV
• Big stories that the Pulitzer Committee might look twice at
• The change to cast a story into book form (or maybe that's just my dream)
  
• Hollywood (in their wildest TV movie fantasies)

Electorally, it was a pretty good day for Democrats. Why couldn't that have been the narrative? Pasting up a new narrative is hard work!

I suppose I should be happy that the media didn't go with its bullshit false equivalence reflex to claim that both Republican and Democratic extremists won. Maybe calling Sestak, Halter, and Critz extremists was too obviously nonsense even for the (non-Fox) media.

Pander with the best of them

Arlen Specter is now an ardent advocate for labor unions.

Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pennsylvania, fighting for his political life in Pennsylvania, kicked the session off with a question about the "trade imbalance" with China and how that hurts union workers.

Oh, bullshit. From RINO to DINO in one election cycle. Specter's stock in trade for years has been pandering. I don't think it'll work this time. What Pennsylvania gets may be much worse.

Laughter is the best medicine, right?

Click image for full Nick Anderson/Houston Chronicle cartoon.

Ex-specter-rated

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Best of both worlds

With a little help from the Republicans, maybe we Democrats can hold the hot Pennsylvania Senate seat with the current DINO until 2010 and then elect a true Democrat.

Yeah, probably a fantasy...

It's entertaining how comfortably Republicans can make both sides of an argument to different groups of people:

After Arlen Specter bolted the GOP Tuesday, Republicans like party chair Michael Steele attacked him as a "leftist" with a history of "left-wing" stands.

That was yesterday.

Twenty-four hours later, his former colleagues in the Senate GOP are rushing to embrace Specter's past in a new campaign designed to highlight the consistency of his Republican record.

You really can't believe a single word that comes out of their mouths.

What's the frequency, Arlen?

Looks as though 60 hurts...

Click image for full Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune cartoon.

Expecting a different result

The Republican Party still hasn't become accustomed to resounding rejection. There is a huge amount of keening, wailing, and breast-beating over Arlen Specter's marriage of convenience to the Democrats. No self-examination other than Olympia Snowe's, however, just more kowtowing to Rush and his doughy [sic] band of ditto-heads.

What does this mean for Democrats? This is good ... for Arlen Specter. It trades now for later. Specter probably would have lost to a real Democrat in 2010, if he didn't lose in the primary to Club for Growth ideologue Pat Toomey. On the other hand, 2010 nationwide looks damn good so far (subject to change with events), so sacrificing a future win for a better chance to pass Obama's agenda now is probably a good trade-off. Atrios hates it, but he's from Pennsylvania and no doubt tired of being represented by Arlen's frequent poses of moderation, belied by later actual votes.

Snowe and Susan Collins are probably pissed that they didn't make a deal. They've been joined at the hip for a while, though, so Specter was probably easier to peel off than the pair of them.

Obama tried conciliation

Once again, we see in stark terms that 'bipartisan' means do it the way the Republicans want and shut up about the rest:

Of the 219 Republicans in Congress, [Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania] were the only three who backed the bill.

The Republicans in the Senate have declared their willingness to filibuster anything, no matter how needed. Obama's honeymoon? Sorry, he doesn't get one from them.

The Republican rump in Congress does not accept the result of the election. They think - if you can call it thinking - that the voters swung that 2 x 4 that hit them between the eyes because John McCain wasn't conservative enough.

Obama wants to be President of the whole country. I can see why. Frustrations aside, it's what the country needs.

Barack at 47 is a mature man in full control of his emotions. Maybe being black in a white world helped make him this way. Maybe his mother and grandparents made him that way. Maybe it's just who he is.

This result - scant Republican support - could be ideal. Obama can fairly say that he made repeated and highly visible attempts to reach across the aisle but that they were all spurned.

Without being visibly angry the way I would have been, Obama has achieved a Democratic bill, passed by Democrats. He and they get all the credit when this succeeds.

Lindsay Graham doesn't even realize that he's been backed into a corner. He doesn't realize how overwhelming the Democratic majority is:

"You couldn't pick up one Republican in the House, and you lost 11 Democrats. You've lost more Democrats than you've picked up Republicans. That's not bipartisanship," he said Wednesday on CNN's "The Situation Room."

And Graham's alleged to be a moderate!

Of course, the upshot is that the Republicans have to try to make the economy and the country fail. Nothing new there. Again, this conservative party needs to be killed and replaced with one that has a semblance of moderation, a little sanity, and a clear belief in democracy.

Holder of the bag

Joe Conason's column on the Marc Rich pardon is very interesting. It's thinly sourced and thus awaits confirmation, but any pundit who puts down these words has the credibility that comes from the demonstrated ability to sniff bullshit:

Holder listened as Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., one of the leading windbags of our time, held forth on how dreadful Rich is and how awful the pardon was.