Matt Gunterman May 14th, 2007
Did you see this quote from Vice President Dick Cheney?
“We didn’t get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican Party.”
Actually, you know, with the direction things are headed in this country today: with $4/gallon gas prices on the horizon; with the housing bubble bursting; with GDP growth slowing to a crawl; with our Big Three automakers in dire trouble; with inflationary pressures still very much alive and well; with climate change wreaking havoc across the continent; with the nation’s resources — both human and capital — mired in a war-of-choice in Iraq; etc.
Yes, if I were Dick Cheney, I’d be worried more about my own personal fate, too, and not that of the Republican Party.
But Senator Mitch McConnell, as we all know, is first and foremost a party man. In fact, that’s all he is. His lasting legacy — which will be a sad, sad one — will have been to infuse corrupt cash into national and state-level GOP party machines. Money equals power for McConnell. Money is success. Money trumps all. McConnell has no guiding political philosophy. Money is his guide.
Anyway, McConnell cares quite a lot about the corrupt machine that he’s built here in Kentucky and back in DC. He only cares about it, of course, because it’s the instrument by which he pleases his money interests and then vacuums up more cash, but he cares about it nevertheless.
Cheney, on the other hand, looks at McConnell’s party machine as expendable in the Bush administration’s all-consuming quest of the moment.
And that quest’s not the Iraq war.
It’s trying to avoid going down in American history as the most incompetent administration ever (it’s a little too late to avoid that in my book).
So, I’m sensing a bit of dissonance here between these two powerful — but equally idiotic — Republicans.
Could we be at the outset of a national-level Republican civil war to match the one we’ve got going on in Kentucky?
We should only be so lucky.
