A recent post on Daily Kos [1] reported on the U.S. House of Representatives passing a bill to loosen Republican restrictions on stem-cell research. Although it sailed through the House and looks set to pass the Senate, George W. Bush has threatened to veto it, and it has not yet gained the support of a veto-proof majority in Congress. However, its backers have promised to reintroduce it until it does.
There was one line in particular from the article that caught my attention:
“I’m confident we’ll have a veto-proof bill this time,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), one of three high-powered Republican supporters of stem cell research who attended the Tuesday briefing. In an odd Washington moment, all three seemed briefly grateful that the Democrats were back in charge.
This excerpt perfectly sums up a feeling I have had several times since the election: that the Republicans, in a bizarre way, are glad that they lost. Another instance that comes to mind is Rush Limbaugh’s stating on air [2] that he felt “liberated” by the election results because he no longer has to “carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried”, and that he no longer feels obligated to defend “some of this legislation coming out of [the Republican Congress] that I have just cringed at”. If he disliked it so strongly, why didn’t he say so then?
There is a comparison that I think needs to be made: the Republicans, at this point, are like drug addicts who’ve finally gotten the help they need. They knew they were out of control, but they were powerless to stop their spiral of self-destructive behavior. Now they’ve been involuntarily committed to medical care, and they are grateful that someone is finally going to save them from themselves.
The Republicans’ behavior during their several years in the majority would seem to support this thesis. The disastrous war in Iraq, the failure to take any effective steps against terrorism, the repulsive intrusion of the Terri Schiavo fiasco, the non-stop pandering to the religious right and endless savage discrimination against gays, the staggering waste and bloat of growing government bureaucracy, and more show how terrible their governance has been for the country. And though there may be a few truly insane conservative legislators who welcome these disasters with open arms, I am certain that the majority of them are not unintelligent people and knew full well what havoc they were wreaking. Limbaugh’s comment shows this, and if he says it, we can be sure there are many more Republicans thinking it.
And yet, as long as these tactics continued to bring them electoral success, the Republicans seemed helpless to wean themselves from their downward spiral. There was only one thing that could have stopped them, and that was the thing that happened: the American public finally grew tired of their corruption and incompetence and threw them out of office. Now the Republicans seem almost glad to be back in the minority, where they belong, and where their irrational rhetoric will remain just that and will not do any additional harm to the country I am sure they love.
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