Coons Style Bipartisan Comity is a Flimsy Potemkin Village
Coons has taken his victory lap on TV and in Delaware City and that’s great. Good for you Chris. But’s let’s look at what passes for Coons style bipartisan comity and understand what a bogus pile of bullshit we are looking at.
1) Coons gave a speech about “darn it, I just think we should be our better selves” or something.
2) Coons himself admits that his audience for that speech was one person – Jeff Flake.
3) Flake was the only audience for Coons’ speech because it is abundantly clear to everyone (including Coons) that NO OTHER PERSON in the entire GOP gave/gives a fuck about Coons style bipartisan comity. Coons might as well have been speaking to the ghost of Tip O’Neill for all the difference it made to the GOP members of the committee.
4) Flake, however, is leaving the Senate.
5) Flake also likes Coons having taken an adventure holiday in Africa with him.
Do we see any future in Chris Coon style bipartisan comity?
Can he take Lindsey Graham on an adventure holiday to Africa? And even then, can Lindsey pre-announce that he isn’t running again? No, and no.
It is utterly impossible for Coons to produce another rabbit from his bipartisan comity hat.
I think the project for people like Coons and Flake (and Carper and Collins, while we’re at it) is to preserve the appearance of a still-functioning political system. Maybe they even think it is, but either way, it’s an essentially conservative project, in the term’s original sense of preserving traditions.
At its base is a sense that cooler heads will prevail, because they always do. Except when they don’t. In the Civil War, the cooler heads eventually prevailed because most of the hot heads got killed in the fighting. The rest founded the KKK, and here we are.
“…preserve the appearance of a still-functioning political system.”
You’re right. The “appearance” is all. As someone poitned out in the other thread – Kavanaugh is going to be confirmed anyway and Flake is going to vote for him, so this is just a big pantomime.
“In the Civil War, the cooler heads eventually prevailed because most of the hot heads got killed in the fighting.”
Not quite how it went.
The hot heads prevailed (Radical Republicans) and failed to manage Reconstruction. A more draconian approach, hanging Lee, Jeff Davis, and all the generals who led traitorous armies, would have produced what?
In my view, seething resentment and an occupation by a military who didn’t want to be there (the South is HOT, man, and miserable if you’re from upstate New York).
However much you disrespect folks like Coons, we need more of them, men and women who will work as best they can in a miserable, divided world to achieve whatever comity they can come up with.
The radical Republicans were not the hot heads. The secessionists were the hot heads.
“Failed to manage Reconstruction.”
Where the fuck did you go to school, Alabama?
Your history is as fucked up as your beliefs. I can get mealy-mouthed platitudes anywhere, I don’t need them here.
Just one more, then I’ll give up, since you are so touchy.
Hotheads are hotheads, doesn’t matter which side they’re on. The Radical Republicans sent administrators from the North to run the secessionist states until they were felt suitable to run their own affairs. Without these people, there would have been no government since oaths of allegiance were required of all former rebels before they were allowed to exercise their rights to vote and hold office.
That’s the failure I meant, and mean.
We have different definitions of hot heads. I don’t recall any abolitionists calling for war.
The failures of Reconstruction were myriad. Read Foner.
Also, Lincoln’s assassination radically changed the direction of Reconstruction policy.
So what? This isn’t about Reconstruction. My line about the hotheads was in reference to Nathan Bedford Forrest founding the KKK.
Alby wrote: “I don’t recall any abolitionists calling for war.”
And you want ME to re-read Foner?
No, I want you to show me, other than John Brown, those who called for armed conflict before it broke out.
Then I want you to tell me how that compares with anti-abolitionists who committed arson and murder against abolitionists.