The next weekend his parents heard shooting, and the mother sent the father to find out why. It stopped for a bit, then started up again. She followed, and saw her husband, hanging to the side of a silo, shooting at a bale of hay, set on a moving tractor.

On the main point, I still object. Republican politicians are not afraid of their base, Democrats are. And the Left benefits from that. Unless we can put some fear into them, we will lose.

Whew. Glad to have been mistaken.

“Immediately after Lieberman concluded his statement, two senior Democrats – Sens. Bob Kerrey (Neb.) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (N.Y.) – rose to endorse Lieberman’s rebuke of the president and to praise him for his words.” Good for them. They were certainly in the minority on the Democrat side.

Joe Lieberman was a principled man. Unusually so in a Democrat, IMO. (Okay, Alan Dershowitz is also a principled Dem.) So unusually so that he decided later in his career that he could no longer be a Democrat. (Dersh can’t bring himself to do it, even though he should.)

Let’s just say the criticism of Bill on the left and in the MSM was rare.

Snow on Pine last commented here on April 14. Not especially long ago.

I assume you know the difference between siding with an opponent on occasion and siding with that opponent all the time (being indistinguishable in goals and actions from that opponent).

It is illogical to pick and choose certain specific ways in which the parties are similar and then say they basically have the same goals and are on the way to the same destination, period. On a few issues, yes, but not – for example – on Israel, not on religious freedom, not on judicial nominations, not on defense, not on education, not on rules for voting security, not on a host of other important issues.

The GOP has a paper-thin majority in the House and is a minority in the Senate. It can’t pass anything in the House unless it’s almost unanimous. Republicans tend to be more individualistic than Democrats in their votes and it’s very hard to get that near-unanimity, and even when it is accomplished then the measures are defeated in the Senate.

I’ve noticed that most of the criticism of the GOP doesn’t take these facts into account – including the fact that not every GOP member of Congress is a conservative. The less conservative, the more like Democrats the GOP member of Congress is. It’s just not a unitary bunch, but that doesn’t mean that it’s indistinguishable from the Democrat Party or even close to that.

Joe Lieberman on Bill Clinton:

“Such behavior is not only inappropriate,” Lieberman said. “It is immoral and it is harmful.” Clinton’s actions, he said, “contradicted the values” the president has publicly embraced for the past six years and “compromised his moral authority” to restore the strength of the American family.