Matt Taibbi takes the Republicans apart for becoming the party that has removed itself from the legislative process. When MSNBC's Carlos Watson tries
April 17, 2009

Matt Taibbi takes the Republicans apart for becoming the party that has removed itself from the legislative process. When MSNBC's Carlos Watson tries to tell him that since they're in the minority all they can bring to the table is guerrilla warfare, Taibbi responds.

Taibbi: What you are saying when you say that is that the GOP is serving as the rodeo clowns or the class clowns of this horrific financial era.

One of the problems they have is that they've really taken themselves out of the picture as a serious force in the Congress. The Minority Leader, John Boehner, has told the party that the GOP has to get used to being not legislators, and they have to focus on being instead communicators, which means they really haven't proposed any serious alternatives to the Obama budget which makes them really non-players in the whole congressional picture.

Watson: Hang on for a second, because they could legitimately say the way the House of Representatives works, those who are in the minority, particularly those who have 80 fewer votes than the Democrats, they realistically don't have a role to play. The best thing they can do is offer guerrilla tactics, if you will, and they can say in the Senate they are doing as much as they can.

Taibbi: The business of legislating is a long, hard slog, and you have to form these bills in committee and all these guys work together constantly. And when they say at the outset that they're not going to propose alternatives, that takes them out of markup process, it takes them out of the committee process. It really makes them non-players throughout the nuts and bolts of the bureaucratic legislative process, and that's what they've done.

Taibbii has a great post at his blog today on the irrelevance of conservatives, reflected in their little Tea Tantrums: "Teabagging Michelle Malkin". It was the reason he was asked on the segment. In it, he teabags the teabaggers with an incredible rant:

So yeah, government waste sucks, it’s rampant at every level, and taxes are a vicious racket, and everyone should be pissed off. What’s hilarious about the teabaggers, though, is how they never squawk about waste until the spending actually has a chance of benefiting them. You will never hear of teabagger crying about OPIC giving $50 million in free insurance to some mining company so that they can dig for silver in rural Bolivia. You won’t hear of a teabagger protesting the $2.5 billion iEx-ImIm loans we gave to GE through the early part of this decade, even as GE was moving nearly a hundred thousand jobs overseas over the course of ten years. And Michelle Malkin’s readers didn’t seem to mind giving IBM millions in Ex-IM and ATP loans at the same time it was giving its former CEO, LoGerstnerer, $260 million in stock options.

In other words teabaggers don’t mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner’s stock options, deliveries of “sailboat fuel,” the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill’s jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs. But they do hate it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure. And God forbid someone propose a health care program, or increased financial aid for college. Hell, that’s like offering to share your turkey with the other Pilgrims! That’s not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfrf*&king turkey!

Read the whole piece, because he points out specifically what we've been saying all along about these Malkinite teabaggers: They are a sham. Where were have they been when Bush and his cronies damaged the fabric of America?

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