Bobby Jindhal was the Republicans' Eddie Gaedel.
I could end today's posting right there. They even rhyme.
Eddie Gaedel dug into the batters box at Sportsman's Park on a lazy August day in 1951. At a little over three and a half feet tall, the midget Gaedel presented an impossibly small strike zone for the Detroit pitcher that afternoon and, predictably, was walked on four pitches.
Like the Republicans, the St. Louis Browns were in trouble. Another losing season loomed and Bill Veek, the Browns' quirky owner, was willing to do anything to put a few fans back in the bleechers. So he signed a midget in a desperate attempt to add excitement to another doomed season.
The Republicans' use of Bobby Jindhal was a similarly pathetic and questionable ploy to revive the sagging party.
Conservatives are at a loss for what to do. Their once almost truthful assertion that they are "the party of ideas" gets no traction with voters. Rush Limbaugh, a crazy and bitter old man sitting alone in a room talking to himself, is the guiding voice of the Republican Party.
This is not good (for them).
But the New York Times has, thankfuly, injected a little EPO into the cold blue blood of the Grand Old Party by hiring a Mr. Ross G. Douthat to replace William Kristol's limp presence on the OpEd page. Douthat is too young (he's 29) to pray at the Reagan alter and thus is not doomed to the same tired mantra of smaller government and deregulation that has doomed the Party of late. He actually has some new ideas that I may be caught saying are actually worth considering.
His ideas, for instance, on radical tax breaks for American families to enable them to keep one parent at home to care for the children is a bone that most yellow dogs will gladly chew. He challenges also the notion of supply-side and trickle-down economics suggesting that taxing the middle class gives little in terms of tax revenue and puts undue pressure on the middle class. Tax the rich, he says, they can afford it.
That's how to get even someone like me to pull the lever for a Republican.
Thanks for sending me over to love slug page, I enjoyed seeing it. It is frightfully late for a slug to be up, or I would comment on your latest post here, just wanted you to know I have read it, I will chew it a bit using my rasp, and I will come back over at a more decent hour to read more about this lever that you speak of pulling. It reminds me of a new and wonderful video game called "world of goo". All of the slugs here at Slugs rest like it. There is a lever involved as you reach the next level. Nitey night! from Mrs. Slug
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