That’s Trent Lott’s description of what transpired, Tuesday, on the floor of the Senate; he didn’t mean in it a complimentary way, but I rather like it. Stink indeed. (Courtesy of Cursor and Joe Gandleman

A former majority leader, Lott said a closed session was appropriate for such overarching matters as impeachment and chemical weapons — the two topics that last sent the senators into such sessions.

In addition, Lott said, Reid’s move violated the Senate’s tradition of courtesy and consent. But there was nothing in Senate rules enabling Republicans to thwart Reid’s effort.

Too true, Trent; you can’t legislate courtesy and consent, you have to earn it.

Let’s see, what kind of courtesy and consent have the Democrats received from Republicans, since they retook the Senate after the 2002 elections? Well, there was Orrin Hatch’s decision, taken without any consultation with any Democrat, to reverse the rules on judicial nominations, wherein the minority party would no longer receive the courtesy of being able to place holds on those appellate court nominees who hailed from their states, a courtesy which Republicans had received through-out Clinton’s two terms; then there was that Republican decision to pass all legislation with only Republican support; one could go on and on, but we need look no further than the Republican response to last Tuesday.

Senator Lott, the former majority leader, didn’t attain the dizzy heights of high dudgeon maintained by the rest of his party, maybe because there was something a little pleasing to him about watching the current majority leader melt down right in front of the cameras.

Let’s replay Dr. Frist’s golden moment, in which he revealed that part of himself which is typical of many powerhouse surgeons, the overly indulged, temper-tantrum-prone child, as described by Dana Milbank in the Wa Po:

“About 10 minutes ago or so, the United States Senate has been hijacked by the Democratic leadership! Never, have I been slapped in the face with such an affront to the leadership of this grand institution. They have no conviction. They have no principles. They have no ideas. This is a pure stunt…This is an affront to me personally. It’s an affront to our leadership. It’s an affront to the United States of America!…for the next year and a half, I can’t trust Senator Reid.”

Senator Frist seems to have led a sheltered life, indeed. Note, also, the ease with which he conflates his standing and dignity with that of the entire nation, as if Democratic voters aren’t really included in his conception of that nation. In fact, more Americans voted for congressional Democrats than for Republicans; the spread of those voters within states is what gave Republicans control of both houses. Fair enough, but this is not a parliamentary democracy, so just when did majority status wipe out the rights of minority voters to any kind of representation….as if we didn’t know.

Okay, I’m savoring Tuesday, but why the hell not?

What Reid et al did was exactly the kind of way-out-of-the-box thinking Democrats need to bring to bear on a political situation in which they have been cast, by Republicans and their faithful servants, the SCLM, in the Ralph Bellamy role, the eternal loser/jerk, earnest but dull, stuck-up, smug, but also a little desperate, and always to be considered highly uncool.

I’m pleased to see that most of the liberal/left blogisphere has responded jubilantly to Reid’s move, and with a keen appreciation for its significance, see this post and comments at Daily Kos, and this analysis from Steve Clemons.

If you haven’t taken the time, yet, to read what Buzzflash justly calls the “J’accuse” speech Senator Reid gave on the floor of the Senate yesterday, you really should.

Could it have been any tougher, clearer, more focused, more cogent, or more telling? Don’t think so. Best of all, it wasn’t just a sour complaint; it’s clear purpose was to force back onto the national agenda the subject from which Alito and Avian Flu were meant to distract us, that of the Republicans’ refusal to make good on their promise to actively examine the relationship between the administration’s drive to war and the deficient intelligence upon which it was based, with an eye to uncovering if, perchance, that bad intelligence was solicited in subtle, or not so subtle ways by some folks in the upper reaches of the Bush administration, considering their reckless willingness to use it uncritically on behalf of a pre-determined policy.

The response of the media has been as contemptuous, contemptible, clueless and cynical as any of us might have expected it to be, but what happened Tuesday could not be ignored, and that was a triumph for the Democrats.

The Tuesday edition of “Hardball” summed up most of the media trends.

Ken Mehlman was first up, talking points already memorized.

Chris, what you saw today was the latest political stunt by the Democrats. It‘s unfortunate, but it‘s actually not surprising. If you think about it, unfortunately too often since the beginning of this war on terror the Democrats‘ first response has been politics.

Think about it.

After the 9/11 attacks when it came to a Department of Homeland Security, they delayed for more than 100 days creating that department because they were worrying about the public employee unions.

Then in ‘04, he was for it before he was against it.

I think one of the reasons the Democrats lost in ‘02, the Senate, and lost the presidential election in ‘04, was because the public saw people who politics was their first answer in this very serious war on terror.

Why do I think that “Think about it,” meant the exact opposite? How do these guys say things like that without either breaking up, or breaking down, at their own mendacity and hypocrisy. Here’s a reminder of just one of the many occasions on which Karl Rove made explicit the Republican determination to ride 9/11 to further electoral victories:

Rove Said Republicans Could Profit Politically from War Because GOP “Better” at “Protecting and Strengthening America’s Military.” According to the Houston Chronicle, “Rove told the Republican National Committee, meeting in Austin last week, that there could be political profit in the war. ’We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America,’ Rove said. Although Rove and some party bigwigs have attempted to row away from the comment, its facial meaning is clear: There’s partisan advantage for Republicans in the war and they’d be crazy not to try to cash in.’ [Houston Chronicle, 1/22/02]

The Matthews-Mehlman exchange is excerpted here; if you have the time, click on the video and take a look at Mehlman’s robotic determination to substitute repeated talking points for anything remotely resembling a discussion, even though Matthews is earnestly trying to engage Mehlman in one, in Tweety’s own inimitable attention-deficit-disordered manner.

You’ll also get an interesting preview of what is becoming the Republican excuse du jour why no one they know should be held responsible for the pre-Iraqi invasion failure of correct intelligence on Saddam’s WMD and the subsequent failure to find any such things in Iraq:

MEHLMAN: Look, I think the last administration, the French, the U.N., our intelligence, the CIA, you name it, all believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

MATTHEWS: Nuclear.

MEHLMAN: They all believed that he had all kinds of programs.

And the fact is that because of that and because of a lot of other reasons, we removed Saddam Hussein from power.

Even if it turns out he didn‘t have the stuff, it was the right thing to do because would we be safer if we had waited until he had refilled his canisters? Would we be safer today? I don‘t think we would.

One of the things that every report that‘s investigated this has found is, in fact, Saddam Hussein was more dangerous than we thought, he was more effective in evading the sanctions than people thought. So I think we made the right decision.

I think this is an attempt by the Democrats to have political football.

As I said, they made a mistake when they did it before and they should stop doing it now.

The American people want their leaders to respond to this war on terror with seriousness, not political stunts.

And can you believe that in response to Matthews question about any possible desire the Vice-President might have to clear the ambiguities about his role in how we got into Iraq, Mehlman is able to say the following with a straight face?

Doesn‘t he want to clear the air and show that he was not involved in this sort of underworld effort to sell the war and to bring down Joe Wilson?

MEHLMAN: Look, the fact is that I think the White House has responded to this investigation in a very admirable way.

Scott McClellan, the vice president, Karl Rove and others, you know what they‘ve done? They‘ve cooperated and they‘ve kept their mouths shut, unlike previous administrations.

We‘re not going after the prosecutor, people aren‘t out there spinning their story. What they‘re doing is they‘re complying, they‘re following the rules.

Let‘s let this go forward. That‘s the right approach and that‘s why what the Democrats are doing today is so outrageous.

Do I even need to tell you all that is wrong and false about that declaration? Let us count the ways, and by all means, please feel free to record any and all of them in comments.

A more serious problem than Mehlman was the pundit performance portion of the program. Called to comment on the performance of Senator Reid and the Democrats that day, Andrea Mitchell, Howard Fineman, and man-about-politics Charlie Cook more or less agreed with Mehlman. In fact, there was no discussion of the substance of what had happened, no reference to Reid’s speech, no ability to connect dots, for instance, like those that might run between everyone’s agreement that Fitzgerald had done his job, no more, no less and had explicitly disavowed making political points, and the recognition that what might be legal, or be provable in court hardly exhausted the subject of either the outing of Valerie Plame or the ethical, policy, and political implications, of the failure of intelligence upon which Bush’s Iraqi policy continues to be based. .

The panel’s emphasis was on deconstructing the actions of the Democrats to its lowest common denominator in terms of the pure, raw politics of the situation.

They couldn’t even explain with any clarity what had gone on; the Democratic demand that the Republican promise to have a Phase Two of the SSCI analysis of how we got to where we are in Iraq went ignored. And even considered as political analysis, that of all present showed the same state of cluelessness as to the multiple meanings of “politics” and “political” as it did about everything else.

Matthews quickly acceded to Andrea Mitchell’s characterization of the Democratic action as “disingenous.” Based, it would seem, on her confusion between the power wielded by a minority congressional party and that wielded by a party which controls both the Presidency and both houses of congress, Andrea saw the Democrats as equally guilty partners in the President’s drive to invade Iraq. She pegged her cynicism regarding Democratic motives on the fact that they voted for the war, a statement fundamentally incorrect and highly misleading, but that didn’t keep her from theorizing that Tuesday was the Democrat’s transparent attempt to disassociate themselves from the war and make it an issue they can run on. And wouldn’t that be an outrage? Were the American people to have some political vehicle by which to hold to account those who conceived of and prosecuted this war so recklessly, carelessly, and yes, ineptly?

Fineman more or less agreed with Mitchell, and going one better than Mehlman, accused Democrats of having access to the same intelligence as did the Bush administration, and of having failed to question it because they didn’t want to know if it was wrong or right, because they feared voting against war in the aftermath of 9/11.

That, of course, is a crock, and on many levels, so much so that discussion of it will be held for a separate post. If you are of a mind to, you can find a transcript of the discussion by clicking here and then scrolling a long way down.

So let me turn my attention, here, to address those of you who are so angry at the Democrats for their performance during September of 2002, which I would be the first to admit was woeful, that your impulse is to agree with this Fineman talking point, which is straight out of the Rove factory.

You shouldn’t give into that impulse.

That anger does Rove’s work for him, most of all by feeding the already too-ready impulse of the SCLM to express open contempt for Democrats, all Democrats, and please remember, never more so than when it’s a Democrat who doesn’t take shit, like Dean, or Kennedy, or Reid, for that matter, a contempt which is passed on to the American voter.

What we need to stay focused on is that a leading Democrat, with full support of the entire party, did something that was dramatically right, three days ago.

If we bloggers and commentators just sit back and wait to be reassured that Democrats are serious, we will have lost the right to demand anything of Democratic party.

If you’ve grown too accustomed to being so skeptical of Democrats you hesitate to get your hopes up, please read this analysis by Mark Schmitt at TPM Care, of the potential for a turning point in what happened on Tuesday.

What if we bloggers and commentators already had done a little organizational work and had in place some sort of structure by which we could have generated 5,000, or 10,000, or 20,000 phone calls or emails to Senator Reid and thre rest of the Democrats, backing up their action.

What other ways might we have to back up Democrats?

Those aren’t rhetorical questions.

We, here at Corrente, are looking for answers. If you have any, well, that’s what comments are for, and we’re open to publishing any good ideas that come are way. It’s not too early for all of us to be thinking about 2006 and taking back congress. To do so, all of us need to start thinking out of the box, way out of the box.

Yesterday evening, one that should live in the annals of infamy, the Senate passed a regressive deficit reduction package without a single Democratic vote. It was damn close, with three Republicans joining the Democrats. It’s a horror of a bill, to which Senator Lautenberg has justly introduced a amendment which would change the name of the act from the “Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005” to the “Moral Disaster of Monumental Proportion Reconciliation Act.” My DD has
“>the story.

Just as Mark Schmitt suggests, this could be a true turning point, but we have some responsibility for insuring that it is. Here’s the link again.

Do me a favor, take a look at the quote from Rosa Parks we’re featuring this week in our sidebar.

Tired of giving in?

Because kvetching without doing anything is giving in.

Go and do.

Even if it’s only sitting down to think about what to do. And don’t forget to let us know what you come up with.