Nov. 1st '05: GSB Day
The Day the Democrats Grew Some Balls

Photo Courtesy of MSNBC
Above: Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV, center) gestures as to what it looks like when he plays with his newly grown balls while Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY, left) and Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin (D-IL, right) courteously pretend not to see. But you know they are both so ready to strike that pose right along with him.

Tuesday evening marked the long-awaited arrival of GSB Day, the day the Democrats in Congress finally grew some balls. Harry Reid invoked, for just the 53rd time ever, Senate Rule 21. What that means is the entire senate room was cleared out, phones pagers and blackberries left at the door, and the news media sent away, for a closed-door emergency meeting. No account of what precisely was said in the meeting is allowed to be made under penalty of being kicked out of the senate. Reid called this meeting (seconded immediately, I think but may be wrong, by Durbin) on the declaration that it is time to know the truth about the intelligence leading up to the Iraq war.

Pat Roberts, the other shithead senator from Kansas (the first being Sam Brownback, who campaigned for re-election last November on the platform of not having interfered with a Kansas state government plan to widen highways, and also having written the failed amendment to ban gay marriage - I really wish that were a joke because it would be hilarious), is in charge of the senate Intelligence Committee. He was running an internal investigation to find out if the Bush administration "deliberately misled" the public based on the intelligence they did or did not gather. Sounds like bull shit already doesn't it? The second phase of the investigation's report was supposed to come out before the November elections, gee I wonder why they didn't make that kind of a deadline. The problem is, according to Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), there's been no indication whatsoever that any progress at all has been made.

In the wake of Pat Fitzgerald's failure to make indictments about the CIA leak (which I posted here about on Friday if you'd like to scroll down), and could only get Libby on protecting his superiors by lying to the grand jury, Democrats in the Senate finally got fed up with the fact that none of these assholes at the top ever have to take responsibility for the shit they pull. The closed door meeting adjourned after about two hours of discussion, and now there is a 6 person bipartisan group that is to report back on the 14th of this month. Of course, the Republicans lost their shit completely.

Pat Roberts is being accused of intentionally stalling the investigation to protect the White House; Chris Bond (guess what party-Missouri) is claiming that the Democrats already signed documents agreeing to drop the subject because clearly there's nobody lying or full of shit even in the slightest working with the Bush administration. In fairness, that assclown is talking about the first phase of the investigation that simply stated that there were no "mistaken assumptions" as a result of "political pressure". No, there weren't any. Nobody was mistakenly assuming. They knew this shit wasn't true to begin with. That's where the whole lying part in phase two comes in that you guys never got around to finishing, get it? Incidentally Bond is also on the Intelligence Committee.

Senate Majority Leader (and rumored front-runner for the '08 Republican nod for the White House), Bill Frist, looked like he'd just opened the ark of the covenant like that dude at the end of that Indiana Jones movie. Except he wasn't horrified by the sight of a righteous and vengeful god so much as he was just really pissed off that he couldn't stop the Democrats from doing something. He claimed that the initiative Reid took was personally offending to him, was a slap in the face (because, clearly, this is all about Bill Frist), was an affront to the entire country, and was just plain wrong. Gee, I had always thought that insisting that the administration that campaigned on bringing integrity back to the White House would be held to a level of integrity. Even that it would be right to do so. Frist would know a lot about integrity by the way, he's currently under investigation for selling stock in his for profit hospital just before it tanked on the market. Yes that is just what those big business white collar crimes were all about, and no you weren't thinking of something else. By the way this man runs the majority party of the senate of the United States of America. He's a bigger ass than Martha Stewart, but I doubt the liberal news media is going to cover the story too closely.

Dr. Frist, I'm sorry, but you are the affront to the country, you probably deserve a good slap in the face, and you are just plain wrong.

Since ethics aren't by any means this guy's strong suit (lied about ever owning the stock he sold, lied about diagnosing Terri Schiavo over a TV screen after doing it on the senate floor, sold that fucking stock illegally, lied that he had any integrity for Democrats to violate, lied that ethics was the cause of his rage after Reid invoked rule 21, etc.) we have to wonder what the hell was actually pissing him off so badly. I think I may know. According to Frist himself, rule 21 can be ended once invoked by a simple majority vote. That means all they needed to do to shut down the Democrats' attempt here was stand up 51 people and that would be the end of it.

There are 55 Republican senators.

Frist couldn't get a majority vote to agree with him that this was a stunt and a waste of time. There are some people in the Republican party that apparently aren't so immoral and realize that the players in the congressional majority is protecting the White House (for example, Pat Roberts). They are just as fed up, and the thing is, they apparently weren't aware that Reid was going to do this. So the grand "stunt" that this has been spun in to was seen by people on both sides of the isle as entirely appropriate. So the minority party stood up, dropped a bombshell that would have been easy to knock down, and they won. Republicans, having no fucking clue what to do when they're not being granted mandates that don't exist, turned immediately back to Clinton-era tactics, and did what people like Ann Coulter claim only seething hate-filled liberals do: they started yelling and calling names.

Of course, the news media (being so liberally biased) will fall in line and agree with the Republicans that it was all a mere publicity stunt, but the Dems struck a real victory here. Happy GSB Day.