Me Thinks They Doth Protest … For A Change

I’m with Digby on this one, and the visuals only drive home the point:

It is past time for elected Democrats to begin laying out the case that the leader of the Republican party, the man to whom the congress has blindly followed at every turn for the past five years, is dishonorable. They must begin to create a low hum that reverberates throughout the body politic that says “the Republican party is unethical, untrustworthy, inept and dishonorable.” Make people hear it in their heads before they go to sleep each night.

Russ Feingold has just taken the first step to doing this. His censure motion will not pass, of course. But he’s started the hum. The press is listening. They are shocked, it can’t be, how can he say that? But Feingold is saying outloud, for the whole nation to hear, that the president defied the law and broke his oath to defend the constitution.

As the magnificent helmeted Cokie Roberts once said, “it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s out there.” In this case, it’s true. And now it’s out there.

Finegold’s motion is “out there” because Bush and the Repubs are so bloodied by now.  It’s a measure of how far and fast Bush has fallen that Repubs are forced to burn prime time capital fending off such an otherwise quixotic attack.  It’s no skin off Finegold’s nose to be meeting with reporters while, simultaneously, Spector rebuts him on the Senate floor.  Visually, in fact, it only adds more weight to the merit of the charge.

Because the Repubs hardly know weakness, these snaps evidence an historical footnote.  They mark the end of the day when any security challenge to the cheerleader-King could be dismissed out of hand.

(Revised 3/14/06 8am PST)

(images: Jason Reed/Reuters. Washington, March 13, 2006.  Via YahooNews.  Caption:  U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) (R) speaks to journalists on Capitol Hill in as Republican Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) appears live on a television giving his rebuttal to Feingold’s effort to censure U.S. President George W. Bush over domestic spying. A censure resolution has been used just once in U.S. history, against Andrew Jackson in 1834.)