Gail Collins is at it again, and I'm here to dutifully document my disdain for every word she writes. It's addictive.
Falling Off the Bandwagon
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: December 8, 2010
Oh dear God, she’s doing Dear Abby.
My boyfriend is a liberal Democrat and ever since the president announced his tax deal with the Republicans, he has been impossible to live with.
So…pretty much par for the course?
First he burned his “Audacity of Hope” sweater.
Did his mother knit it for him for Christmas? Who has a political sweater? Is Jimmy Carter back in vogue on the left?
Then he began messing up the cat’s litter box,
Try the literary classic “Everybody Poops.”
claiming he needed to draw “lines in the sand.”
Wah waaa (that sound effect doesn’t work as well in text)
Now he wants to call off our wedding
Don’t read into it that you just happen to have put on five pounds.
because he says that when you put your trust in people, they break your heart.
Miserable Moderate
All moderates are miserable. It’s the natural condition of being without a spine.
Dear Miserable,
Ask your boyfriend if he would rather spend the entire holiday season wondering what Senator Joe Lieberman will do next
I pitched that game show five years ago. It involved Joe Lieberman running through a series of puzzles based on cryptic clues from mimes. NBC wanted it, but really, who wants to put a show on NBC? That and I couldn’t find a non-creepy mime.
and whether Olympia Snowe will vote for cloture.
This game show pitch was far less successful.
Then he will turn pale and offer to take you out for a nice dinner.
But don’t ask him if you look fat in those jeans.
Answerperson
***********
Look on the bright side, Democratic base.
At least she understands who the Times’ readership base is.
You’ve been urging President Obama to get really mad.
IMAGE:
Ever since the inauguration, you’ve been waiting for him to take a stand, point fingers at the people who are blocking progress and demand that they get the heck out of the road.
He did that. He got laughed at. Really, for someone from the South Side of Chicago
And this week he did it! Yippee!
Of course the liberal Democrats did not really plan on his getting mad at the liberal Democrats. But you can’t have everything.
“You’ll take what we give you and like it” also happens to be the Democrats’ tax policy.
“This isn’t the politics of the moment. This has to do with what can we get done right now,” the president said heatedly as he defended his tax deal with the Republicans against outrage from the Congressional left.
It takes a lot to make President Obama incoherent.
Specifically, technical issues with the teleprompter.
I think the vision of trying to corral 60 votes in the Senate
Also known as “his job.”
on the night before Christmas
Like last year?
sent him over the brink.
The lame-duck Senate has been extremely busy not passing a range of legislation.
Yet another example of productive obstructionism and necessary partisanship.
The votes on two Democratic proposals to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for everybody but the rich were 53 to 37 and 53 to 36. Of course, under venerable Senate tradition, that means they failed entirely.
Outrage in 2004; Sarcasm in 2010. Remember back when the Senate threatened to use the “nuclear option” to push through Bush judicial nominees? Gail Collins was all for the venerable Senate tradition back then.
It was at that point that Obama announced a deal with the Republicans to salvage unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless and create a sort of ministimulus bill with tax cuts for everybody, including the working poor, besides the dreaded, hated giveaway to the undeserving wealthy.
I can’t even tell anymore. Is this sarcasm?
“The American people are outraged!” said Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont
Judging the American people by what goes on in Vermont
He wanted the president to draw that line in the sand,
Alternately, cat litter.
let the unemployment benefits lapse,
Agreed.
the tax code fall into limbo, and hold out until public opinion forced 60 votes to come around.
Which might eventually happen, but only after the left dwindles to a House with 25 Democrat members in 2013.
If you really wanted the American people to rally around no-tax-cuts-for-richies,
And really, what’s more unifying for the citizenry than pilfering from certain citizens?
shouldn’t we have had this conversation before the election?
We did, but judging from the issues that Gail was talking about, I’m guessing she missed it.
It’s a lot easier to send Washington
I really want to show my disdain for wealth, but I can't very well do it in my $185 North Face fleece.
No, we waited until now because the Senate leaders left the timing up to their members who were running for re-election, and the Democrats in question said they’d rather not have to go on the record.
Profiles in courage.
O.K., I’ve got to admit it. I’ve fallen off the line-in-the-sand bandwagon.
Speaking of falling off the wagon, this column makes me thirsty.
For one thing, opposing the Obama-Republican deal puts you on the same side as Sarah Palin,
::Play Darth Vader music from Star Wars:: THE HORROR!
who sent out one of her twitters
Much to just about everyone’s chagrin, the term is “tweets.”
from hell
“Helltweet” would be a pretty decent name for a metal band.
on the subject, and Christine O’Donnell, the former Senate candidate.
“Helltweet Minion” would be even better.
At a Tea Party meeting on Dec. 7, O’Donnell announced that it was a day of sorrow and “Tragedy comes in threes: Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth Edwards’s passing and Barack Obama’s announcement of extending the tax cuts, which is good, but also extending the unemployment benefits.”
Still not as bad as saying that there are 57 states.
(I am happy to note that O’Donnell has announced that she’s got a book deal and a new political action committee. Really, I don’t know what I’d do if she went away.)
Plus, the Senate has worn me down. The filibuster rule makes it impossible to do anything more difficult than passing rules against tainted food,
A bill made famous for banning school bake sales. When only outlaws have cupcakes…
and the Democrats have not made any serious attempt to get rid of the filibuster rule. So work around them, I say.
Exactly. Vote Republican.
We have no idea if Obama’s unheroic
Speaking of unheroes/antiheroes, doesn’t Obama remind you of a new kind of Holden Caulfield who is so angry at the world for not being as he believes it should be that he is literally unable to function in reality?
attempt to get a deal done is going to pass. The Democratic senators who totally failed to exempt the wealthy from a tax-cut extension are outraged at the president for giving up on them.
“This is beyond politics. This is about justice and doing what’s right,” said
Soon to be former
Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana
Slammed? Not so much. Try the following: whined, squawked, rambled, droned,
“the almost, you know, moral corruptness” of tax cuts for millionaires.
Which is almost, you know, coherent.
It was a stirring statement,
It was stirring, yet Collins had to pluck a quote where she droned and fluffed more than a mousy freshman in his first communications class. The only thing she was missing was poorly scrawled note cards and her hands jammed defensively in her pocket. No wonder they were so enamored with Obama’s (snicker) godlike oratory.
and would have been even more so if Landrieu had not been one of the few Democrats who actually voted to put the tax cuts on the books in the first place in 2001.
Props to research! It’s fun to see how these dolts vote when they’re no longer terrified of being voted out of office.
Senator Harry Reid has already warned that members of his caucus “have concerns” that will need to be addressed.
Was this before or after he spent 10 minutes on the Senate floor droning on about Nevada beating Boise State?
He has one himself about legalizing online poker, a matter that the casino interests in his state of Nevada
Meh.
So this is what it takes to put the drama in Obama.
Well, that and Fox News.
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