The playwright David Mamet wrote a great piece in the L.A. Times last week using poker as a metaphor for our current political reality viz a vis the Democrat-Republican relationship.
Fold means keep the money, I’m out of the hand; call means to match your opponents’ bet. That leaves raise, which is the only way to win at poker. The raiser puts his opponent on the defensive, seizing the initiative. Initiative is only important if one wants to win.
The Republicans are aggessive players who seize and create initiative with that aggression. They have courage. Democrats are pussies who just sit at the table and call or fold time after time so that when they do have that huge hand that could turn the table to their favor they are in no position to use it.
For example, take a player who has never acted with initiative — he has never raised, merely called. Now, at the end of the evening, he is dealt a royal flush. The hand, per se, is unbeatable, but the passive player has never acted aggressively; his current bet (on the sure thing) will signal to the other players that his hand is unbeatable, and they will fold.
Democrats have stood passively by watching their opposition steal an election in 2000, make up a war, lower taxes for the rich, send borderline felons and genocide enablers up for confirmations, cut social programs in favor of faith based ones, try and turn science into a joke, and use underhanded tactics to discredit their opposition. But Bush’s approval rating has been lower than a proven crook who had to resign the post 32 years ago. The administrations getting killed on the Katrina fallout. Even the media is starting to be less obedient. And what are the Democrats doing about it?
Well for one their giving the administration a free pass on a Supreme Court Justice nominee even as the White House has refused to release crucial documents pertaining to Roberts background and evidence exists that he engaged in unethical acitivity while being interviewed for the job. But instead of raising at the table and blocking a guy who just might be a misogynist, racist, free market hack based on many of his past rulings, recommendations, and writings, we get a divided Democratic Judiciary Committee that includes the important confirming vote of Senator Patrick (he’s dead to me now) Leahy of Vermont, who decided to approve Roberts. “I take him at his word that he will steer the court to serve as an appropriate check on potential abuses of presidential power.” CNN
He takes him at his word? The Republicans continue to be bold poker players and are apparently playing against wooses who have never heard of the concept of bluffing.
I mean for god’s sake even Republicans are turning on Bush. Their is massive congressional outcry over his budget proposals for fixing N.O.
The pushback on Katrina aid, which the White House is also confronting among House Republicans, represents the loudest and most widespread dissent Bush has faced from his own party since it took full control of Congress in 2002. As polls show the president’s approval numbers falling, there is growing concern among lawmakers that GOP margins in Congress could shrink next year, and even rank-and-file Republicans are complaining that Bush is shirking the difficult budget decisions that must accompany the rebuilding bonanza. Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.) said he and other fiscal conservatives are feeling “genuine concern [which] could easily turn into frustration and anger.”
This guy is so faltering right now. Why not seize the intiiative and raise the stakes by taking Roberts down with him instead of sitting around hoping capitulation here will make things go better on the next round when these absolute idiots seem to think they’ll be able to stop the nominee for O’Connor’s seat and instead get Atticus Finch sent their way.
Are they going to sit by and watch as Republicans propose to help pay for rebuilding by cutting yet more of their prized soldiers benefits? That’s right. The small p who managed to bluff his way through Yale, various oil business failures, a squalid Baseball franchise just now getting respectabiblity after his incompetent ownership, now is refusing to help pay for this mess by freezing and rescinding his tax cuts for the rich but instead wants to send up a plan
that includes trimming military quality-of-life programs, including health care.
Possible sources of funding cuts to free up money for Katrina relief include reduced health benefits, consolidation of the three military exchange systems and the closure of the military’s stateside school system.
Seriously there’s a special place in Hell for these fuckers. But this isn’t a world of Hell’s or Heaven’s and they know it. It’s a world where the race goes to the fittest and most aggressive. As Mamet put it in his above linked column: “The Republicans, like the perpetual raiser at the poker table, became increasingly bold as the Democrats signaled their absolute reluctance to seize the initiative.”
But you get your Roberts’s and Bolton’s and your estates tax cuts, and Karl Rove’s put in charge of rebuilding N.O. when you help set precedence at the poker table with shit like this, also from Mamet:
John Kerry lost the 2004 election combating an indictment of his Vietnam War record. A decorated war hero muddled himself in merely “calling” the attacks of a man with, curiously, a vanishing record of military attendance. Even if the Democrats and Kerry had prevailed (that is, succeeded in nullifying the Republicans arguably absurd accusations), they would have been back only where they started before the accusations began.
Control of the initiative is control of the battle. In the alley, at the poker table or in politics. One must raise. The American public chose Bush over Kerry in 2004. How, the undecided electorate rightly wondered, could one believe that Kerry would stand up for America when he could not stand up to Bush? A possible response to the Swift boat veterans would have been: “I served. He didn’t. I didn’t bring up the subject, but, if all George Bush has to show for his time in the Guard is a scrap of paper with some doodling on it, I say the man was a deserter.”
This would have been a raise. Here the initiative has been seized, and the opponent must now fume and bluster and scream unfair. In combat, in politics, in poker, there is no certainty; there is only likelihood, and the likelihood is that aggression will prevail.
Mamet is right on. That’s why I loved Howard Dean. He was a goddamn player not afraid to be bold and play gritty style. The only calling he’d do is on them for all their lies and tactics. At the table he’d raise the stakes and put them on the defensive as they should be. But the losers still haven’t learned and continue to betray their core constituency by sitting passively though a tremendous oportunity to seize the advantage and dictate the means and content of debate has been dropped into their gutless laps.
Hopefully Dean can have an effect as Chairman of the DNC, and those like Kennedy and Dianne Feinstein who are putting up resistance to Roberts and others such as Henry Waxman and Nanci Pelosi who do so in other corridors, can as well. But clearly there is a big problem and a lack of a true opposition party in this country. It’s borderline conspiritorial how Dem’s have aided and abetted these perps over the past few years right down to that total idiot Kerry who continues to send me friggin e mails to encourage the kind of activism and opposition this guy showed so little of it when it really mattered. This imbecile is like some loser teaching people how to play poker because he couldn’t handle the heat of the table and wasn’t up to the cool brutal stares of the real men who stared his pansy ass down and left him to clean up the room afterwards with a nice tip and pat on his head.
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