Response to Making Useless Trouble

(See: Just Above Sunset: Making Useless Trouble)

Sometimes, when struggling to understand something puzzling going on around us, it helps to turn to metaphor.

I'm pretty sure future historians will see the ongoing saga between Barack Obama and his Republican foes in terms of some comical TV cartoon series -- e.g., Rocky and Bullwinkle vs Boris and Natasha -- in which each episode presents a confrontation between our hero and his arch-enemies, in which goodness always triumphs in the end and evil is foiled, with the bad guys left to slink back to their lair to concoct some new nefarious scheme.

From the beginning, our hero's pledges to cooperate with his nemeses are thwarted by the bad guys intriguing to annihilate him. But despite their efforts, he is able to pass a huge health reform bill, a fiscal stimulus, put an end to the Bush tax cuts, and also snatch the country from the jaws of depression, turning the economy around and sending it on the road to recovery. Meanwhile, the frustrated villains, usually as some attempt to do away with healthcare for poor people, hatch plot after plot that can't fail -- even though it always does -- from voting about 60 times to close it down, to shutting down the government and attempting (although unsuccessfully) to blame it on our hero, to threatening to stop the country from paying its bills, which would probably cripple the nation's credit rating in the process.

Boris and Natasha's latest complicated scheme was supposed to involve (see if you can follow this) a congressional vote to not approve a deal negotiated with Iran to make sure that country didn't build any nuclear bombs, and then to override the hero's veto -- or even if they failed to override, they would at least embarrass him by making him veto something the "people's branch" voted in favor of. This, too, fell through after they discovered their nemesis had lined up not only enough votes to defeat the original measure but also shut down the vote, leaving the bad guys to scramble for some other foolproof strategy, which turned out to be to pretend they never got all the information they needed to vote, which would supposedly explain why they never did vote, but then to propose their own vote in favor of the Iran deal, which they assumed would fail, but then to also...

And so the plan goes, marching off to the horizon, where it presumably drowns in the ocean or falls off the edge of the earth.

I suppose we can't completely blame the schemers for all their convoluted machinations, since, let's face it, Obama set them up.

Remember back earlier this year, when the ploy of the "anti-dealers" was to argue that Obama, in setting this accord up as an Executive Agreement rather than a Treaty, wasn't allowing Congress to approve the deal either way, and then, suddenly, Obama gave in -- which I guess was seen by many as a surrender. Maybe those people should have delved a little deeper into why such a sudden change of heart on the White House's part.

In retrospect, it's easy to see that Obama and his people, after some noodling, concluded that they had nothing to fear from a disapproval vote, and maybe something to gain, once they realized that they had the votes to win, and might even be able to muster enough to defeat cloture. Which is exactly what happened, leaving the opposition with nothing to do but brainstorm for more symbolic gestures that will either succeed or fail to do nothing more than possibly -- but only possibly -- make Obama look bad, at least to those who already don't like him.

Which, by the way, is about all the Republicans have accomplished in the last seven years. And when you think about it, it's not hard to understand why:

Obama's side has had a leader all that time (that leader being, Obama), whereas the Republicans have not, and still don't.

In fact, whoever it is that passes for Republican leadership (Boehner and McConnell) get nothing but boos at the mention of their names at Republican gatherings these days, mostly from that same gaggle of goofballs who are most responsible for their leadership's fecklessness.

And to top it off, this whole crowd still calls the president "naive".