"World's greatest deliberative body"

Dana Milbank joins me in mocking the nuclear option clown show:

Senators love to talk about their chamber as the "world's greatest deliberative body."

Yesterday morning, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) used the phrase. Yesterday afternoon, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) used it. But it took Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) to show why the Senate is the world's greatest deliberative body.

The octogenarian legislator, rising in defense of the filibuster, displayed a larger-than-life poster of Ian McDiarmid playing the evil Supreme Chancellor Palpatine in the just-released film "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith."

"In a far-off universe, in this film, the leader of the Senate breaks the rules to give himself and his supporters more power," Lautenberg inveighed. "I sincerely hope that it doesn't mirror actions being contemplated in the Senate of the United States."

Lautenberg juxtaposed the evil chancellor with another poster, of Jimmy Stewart playing Sen. Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." That film, Lautenberg said, "is a celebration of this Senate, the world's greatest deliberative body. But if the majority leader is successful in ending the filibuster . . . we will move from the world's greatest deliberative body to a rubber-stamp factory."

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, people might have considered such a display on the Senate floor to be cheap. But in the debate over President Bush's judicial nominees, which won't end until Tuesday at the earliest, anything worth saying on either side has long ago been said -- repeatedly.

...[I]t was hard to top Lautenberg, whose staff announced, in a media advisory, that the senator "will have visual aids to make his point -- great for television!" After Lautenberg, echoing a new MoveOn.org advertising campaign, likened Republican leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) to Palpatine, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), on a visit to the Senate press gallery, was asked what character Democrats represent. "We are the Jedi knights," he replied instantly. "We have the light source."

Frist spokesman Bob Stevenson scoffed at these claims, suggesting the Democrats are in fact led by a floppy-eared outcast from Naboo. If Frist is Palpatine and Democrats are Jedi, Stevenson wondered, "would that make Howard Dean Jar Jar Binks?"

It is a question worthy of the world's greatest deliberative body.

Comments

[anony 45]

See, now that was funny. No expletives.

[Ben]

I think Schumer's right. The Democrats are the Jedi Knights. A bunch of supposedly wise warriors who sit around talking about how smart they are while the a supposedly harmless leader is taking control of the entire Republic. When they get attacked, it turns out most of these supposedly great leaders can get taken down by a few lousy gunshots.

Their "chosen one" who was supposed to lead them to victory turns out to be a whiner whose incompetence leads to the enemy's triumph.

And their senior statesman, whether from West Virginia or Dagobah, is a shriveled old elf who sounds wise but, when you actually listen to him, no fucking sense he makes.

(Then again, Byrd may be Boss Nass from Episode 1. Their jowls are nearly identical.)