Left-wing radio talker Thom Hartmann is hobbled with a decidedly short memory. He condemns Republicans for wasting no time in their plans to thwart President Obama, literally from the first day of his presidency.
Hartmann has apparently forgotten that one has to go way, way back to the second Bush presidency to see the opposition party so determined in its efforts to undermine the chief executive.
Only when it's Republicans in the minority does the refusal to roll over for the powers that be rise to the level of "treason" for Hartmann. More specifically, "moral treason," a spiffy new euphemism from the left.
On his radio show Tuesday, Hartmann rode one of his favorite hobby horses with an extended rant on the so-called "Caucus Room conspiracy" --
So the Republicans are talking about making the number two guy right now in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, the number one guy, making him Speaker of the House, making him number three heartbeat away from the president, or the third person in the line of suc-, or arguably the second person in the line of succession (Hartmann mispronouncing it as "secession").... Here's my problem with this, with Kevin McCarthy -- back in 2009, the night that President Obama was dancing with his wife and Ellen Ratner (White House correspondent for Talk Radio News Service and Fox News analyst) and I were dancing down at Union Station with President Obama and Michelle and with Joe Biden and Jill, Dr. Biden, I was Ellen's guest, it was really cool, it was really nice to be there at the presidential inauguration.
This was Jan. 20, 2009, right, the president was elected in November of 2008 but he gets sworn in on January 20th, 2009, he was sworn into office that day. There were three million people here in this town. I did my show live standing about 100 feet from President Obama as he was sworn in. I was one of the closest members of the press to him when he was sworn in. Ellen helped us get that plum spot in the international press row ...
Hartmann, it's worth noting, was not a member of the "international press" then and isn't one now ...
... right up at the same level, I mean, I was 150 feet from George W. Bush. I got to watch him make, literally make faces at President Obama during his inaugural address. And Dick Cheney was sitting there, you know, like a, like a, well whatever, an old insect or something, sitting there in his wheelchair.
But that night, a group of Republicans, 14 Republicans, got together in a restaurant called the Caucus Room. They got a private room, they met (with) Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz, the GOP minister of propaganda, and they conspired to destroy the Obama presidency the night that it began. This comes out of Robert Draper's book, it was originally titled They Know Not What They Do or something like that (Do Not Ask What Good We Do). ...
And keep in mind, at this point in time we were losing 750,000 jobs a month, the economy was in the tank, and these guys swore an oath to each other that they would block this president from doing anything successful.
The nerve of these players, stubbornly refusing to let the other team score!
First black president in the history of America, not going to have a legacy, not going to have any successes. Pete Sessions said Taliban insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban. Insurgency is the way they go about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire process. We need to understand that insurgency may be required when dealing with the other side. We will become insurgency, insurgency is a mindset.
Coming out of that meeting, or at the meeting, Congressman Kevin McCarthy, according to Robert Draper's book, at the meeting, Representative Kevin McCarthy said we've got to challenge them on every single bill. Now that would include bills promoted by Republicans, right? In other words, we will not even pass our own legislation if this president supports it. No legacy -- unsuccessful president. He said we gotta show, I'm quoting, show united and unyielding opposition to the president's economic policies, end of quote.
This man was part of the Caucus Room conspiracy. The group that was there was Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Pete Sessions, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren, Jim DeMint, Jon Kyl, Tom Coburn, John Ensign and Bob Corker. They set the tone for how the Republican Party has been behaving for six and a half years. Newt Gingrich, on this program, admitted that, yes, they had that meeting and he said, yeah, we're the opposition, that's what we should have done.
So my bottom line, my net net, is no member of the Caucus Room conspiracy should ever ascend to the level of Speaker of the House of Representatives, number three in succession to the presidency.
Right at the start of his interview with Gingrich, Hartmann cited the acrimony between President John Adams and his vice president, Thomas Jefferson, leading to Jefferson defeating Adams in the election of 1800. As Hartmann put it, "a political party or politicians conspiring against another political party or working to oust another politician who's already in office is nothing new. This was during the term of the second president of the United States."
"The founding fathers were all insurgents," Gingrich said, "and as you point out, Jefferson is an insurgent against the Adams' presidency." Hartmann, meekly -- "right."
Several minutes later on his radio show Tuesday, Hartmann rekindled the rant by alleging Republicans who took part in the Caucus Room gathering were guilty of a novel brand of treason --
So once again, for the record, I am strongly of the opinion that these men, and they are all men who participated in the Caucus Room conspiracy -- and continue too! (They remain Republicans!), to this day. None of these men should be made Speaker of the House of Representatives because I believe that they have committed treason. Maybe not the kind of treason that is elevated to the level of, you know, prosecution or firing squad or what-, not that kind of, but a political, you know, a moral treason, let's say. ... They have violated the spirit of this country.
James Madison, in Federalist 10, warned us about the power of faction. Faction was defined as a group of people who represent a special interest that's contrary to the interests of the nation. The Republican Party is the only political party in the world that denies global climate change. Why? Because they have become a faction. They are, actually not all Republicans, there are a few Republicans who actually acknowledge climate change, but institutionally the party does not, or at least it seems so and I would say it's because of the influence of big money.
I mean, the Koch brothers are going to spend, you know, $900 million in this election, almost a billion dollars in this election, it's all going to go to Republicans, and the Koch brothers inherited an oil dynasty from daddy, from Fred, Fred Koch. So if you're looking at $900 million, gee, to get your hands on some of that money, all you have to do is say climate change doesn't exist. That's easy.
And seeing how the Koch brothers singled out Wisconsin governor Scott Walker as the GOP candidate they want as president, there is obviously nothing stopping Walker from going all the way. Oh wait ...
Funny thing about that book by Robert Draper -- the Caucus Room "conspiracy" wasn't the only closed-door cabal illuminated therein. In his April 2012 review of the book for the Wall Street Journal, ABC News political correspondent Jonathan Karl recounted another as described in Draper's book --
In July 2011, when news first leaked that President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner were secretly negotiating a "grand bargain" of entitlement cuts and tax increases, top Democrats in Congress thought that Mr. Obama had lost his mind. After all, the Democratic playbook for winning back control of Congress was to vilify Republicans for their plan, enshrined in Rep. Paul Ryan's budget, to control the cost of Medicare. That the president was willing even to talk about making cuts to the program seemed to threaten the Democrats' No. 1 campaign issue.
A rescue operation was soon under way. In Do Not Ask What Good We Do, Robert Draper vividly describes a closed-door caucus meeting of House Democrats just after the world learned about Mr. Obama's secret talks with Mr. Boehner. Nancy Pelosi prepared her fellow House Democrats to go to battle against the president. (emphasis added). She told them she would deliver the message directly to the White House the next day. "Do I have your permission," Ms. Pelosi, her voice rising, asked her fellow Democrats, "to go over there and say, 'We're not cutting Medicare, we're not cutting Social Security?' " The party rank-and-file "applauded wildly," Mr. Draper says. "She had no intention of letting Obama hand the Democrats' winning formula over to Boehner as a sacrificial offering."
It has become conventional wisdom to say that the House Republicans, led by hard-line freshmen, killed any chance of a grand bargain by refusing to consider tax increases. Mr. Draper's vignette suggests that the House Democrats also stood ready to drive a stake through the heart of the grand bargain. As it turned out, the whole idea died before either Ms. Pelosi or the House Republicans had a chance to kill it.
Surely the Democrats in going to "battle" against Obama did not commit "treason" as Hartmann would define it. By process of elimination, at least by liberal logic, they must have been motivated by racism.
