I will never be a politician. One of the reasons is because if I were, I’d have to say stuff like this:
The process used to get this bill to 60 votes was unlike anything I had never [sic] seen before. Deals were cut behind closed doors for individual senators and their states at the expense of taxpayers across the nation – and that’s just not right. The majority leader also made a compromise on abortion – where, morally, there can be no compromise – to get his 60th vote.
Saxby Chambliss’ (R-GA) full statement about the health care bill senate passage can be found at GeorgiaFrontPage.com. As an amusing aside, I would have preferred to link directly to something on Chambliss’ website, but there’s nothing there. How do you let people scoop you with your own statements?
Why won’t I ever be a politician? Because statements like that would really stick in my craw. It’s unbelievable (yet existent, so it must be believable) pandering to his Republican base which is entirely understandable, yet the wording is insane.
It’s understandable because the base is what elected him. He needs to make sure the people who don’t look deeply into things know that he’s not into this back-room deal-making fiasco that is Washington Politics nor does he support abortion. I can just hear Joe Six-Pack sitting in his barcalounger shouting “Fuck Yeah!” at Fox News, but as I just said, that statement is insane.
First, “The process used to get this bill to 60 votes was unlike anything I had never [sic] seen before.” Really? I doubt it. This might be factual in the sense that he’s never seen precisely this sort of sausage being stuffed, yet when he was elected to the Senate in 1994 the Democrats held a 56/44 majority in the Senate. There must have been similar struggles. This statement is just so much bumph I don’t want to think about it. When has politics not been about back room deal making? Like or hate it, that’s the truth.
Second, “The majority leader also made a compromise on abortion – where, morally, there can be no compromise – to get his 60th vote.” This statement is also factually true yet fundamentally false. The Majority Leader made a compromise that moved the abortion issue closer to where a Republican like Chambliss would like to see it: No Federal funding. So, yes, Harry Reid compromised abortion by moving toward the Republican end of things therefore quote-mine the word “compromise” out of that and beat the Democrats over the head with it in order to pander to the voters. I’m not going to even discuss the rectitude of “no compromise” with respect to abortion or any other thing.
Third, I personally understand exactly why Senator Chambliss said what he said. I also understand that if I were in his shoes, I would be doing exactly the same things because that’s how the game is played. And that’s why I could never be a politician. While I see how the partisan process functions, I have no desire to twist my ethics into the knots required to make statements such as that above. It would be nice if we lived in a country where every citizen took the time to know the issues and become involved rather than repeating talking points on major items that have been ingrained into us by ideologues, however that is not the country we possess. Unfortunately.
