Democrats in Congress: The Cowards of the Country:
Back years ago, the Rude Pundit remembers fucking hating the Kenny Rogers song "Coward of the County." You remember that one? It's about this punk-ass bitch-boy named Tommy who's so scarred by his father dying in prison for being a bad man that he refuses to fight for any reason, leading "everyone" to call him the title. In fact, his father's dying words were the bullshit last gasps of an asshole: "Now it don't mean you're weak if you turn the other cheek" and "You don't have to fight if you're a man." This makes Tommy avoid all confrontations, "twenty years of crawlin'," his narrating uncle tells us. But he still finds a woman who doesn't mind that he's a little bitch, and he marries Becky. And what makes Tommy finally fight? When Becky is gang-raped by the three Gatlin boys. Then he walks into a bar and guns them down, with the song ending in Tommy explaining his actions to his dead criminal father, hoping the ghost of his dad doesn't think he was weak. We were supposed to sympathize with Tommy for picking his battles.

So, in other words, because this worm of a man was too much of a pussy to have confrontations, poor Becky was savagely assaulted. Cause and effect, ya know? If the Gatlin boys thought that Tommy might blow their heads off, they wouldn't have touched Becky. And when the smoke clears, yeah, Tommy may have finally done something, but Becky's gotta live with the trauma and pain done to her, thanks to her pathetic husband. What's the triumph here? That Becky might not get gang raped again? Damn, the victory line's pretty goddamn low.

The Rude Pundit thinks about that song whenever he hears about every capitulation by the Democrats in Congress. Every day, it seems, we get news of another crawl through the dirt as the Democrats make themselves prostrate to the whims of the Republicans. If this is what being a majority means, then, fuck, why fuckin' bother?

Let's see what we've gotten in the couple of days:
- Nancy Pelosi forced California Rep. Pete Stark to apologize for giving voice to some modicum of frustration with the state of the war. Goddamn, at least "for the President's amusement" is a reason that makes some bit of sense as to why we aren't talking about the troops coming home. 'Cause, at this point, ain't this really the war of a paranoid whim? But if someone in the Congress says that, then the Republicans go as apeshit as a gorilla in heat trapped in a cage and those fuckin' bananas ain't gonna tickle a gorilla clit when it needs monkey love. So if the Republicans squawk, Pelosi jumps 'cause it might be distracting from debating whether or not MoveOn sucks.

- The Senate voted to confirm Leslie Southwick as a federal appeals court judge. A racist, homophobic judge in Mississippi is soooo 1959, but Harry Reid couldn't even put together a 41-vote filibuster to stop the nomination. Republicans can filibuster every fuckin' bill they want, but if Democrats dare to think about blocking a vote on a judge, that's a fuckin' abrogation of constitutional duties. This is a guy who thinks homosexuality is a choice and therefore because a mother exerted "her perceived right" to be in a lesbian relationship, she shouldn't have custody of her child. Bully for progress. With an extra "Fuck you" to Dianne Feinstein for even letting the nomination get out of committee.

Funding for the war, secret wiretaps, retroactive immunity for telecoms for privacy violations, the coming confirmation of Michael "If the President Thinks He Needs to Kill a Child to Appease the War Gods, the Constitution Can't Stop Him" Mukasey as our next worthless Attorney General - what's gonna be the rape of Becky, where the cowards finally take a stand against a neanderthal Republican party and its hated President? Of course, the problem is that Becky will have been raped to begin with. Will she ever recover?

Maybe Nancy Pelosi will follow through with the planned new vote on SCHIP today while several anti-SCHIPpers are in California for a fire photo op with the President. That'd be hardball politics, the kind that says, "Don't fuck with me."

(Oh, and the Rude Pundit knows he's given Democrats in the Senate a pass because of the Lieberman factor, but at some point, that ain't enough of a reason to keep backing down and backing down.)