Cantor (Eric): It's Not Just A Name, It's A Job

By Lee Russ

Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 08:46 PM

Looks like Eric Cantor, the Republican Congressman from Virginia, is next in line. You know, like Frist and DeLay and Santorum, and so on: the appointed Republican bulldog who growls, snarls, occasionally wags his tail, and always uses whatever other means necessary to keep the conservative troops in line and the federal government so bogged down in irrelevant and untrue detail that it can't act in furtherance of the public interest. You know, just like the job of cantor is to "Chant[] or recite[] religious texts during worship services or other observances and train[] and lead[] congregants in musical responses." Just think of tax cuts and resistance to public benefits as the religious text and you get the idea.

Here's the point. Raw Story reported that Cantor and his House buddies planned a press conference for this afternoon to publicize their claim that House dems are being partisan, contrary to our new president's pledge to be bipartisan (and, by the way, Nancy doesn't play nice). Yes, now Obama is the good guy, according to Repubs (look how nice we're being to him), but that bad, bad Nancy won't listen to the good guy.

I'm assuming that this is the same press conference at which Eric and the Cantorettes (Dave Camp (MI), Peter Roskam (IL), and, of course, good old John Boehner (OH)) did publicly ask to "sit down with the president and talk about our ideas....To preserve jobs and to create jobs has to be the goal. Fast-acting tax relief, we believe, is the best way to do that."

Yes, fast-acting is a good phrase, absolutely harks back to the old upset stomach commercials where the product provides fast-acting relief. And tax cuts, God knows, haven't been tried in a hell of a long time. Not since....yesterday? The last round of those cuts is still in effect and, as any fool can see, doing a damn fine job in stimulating the economy.

But of course the real point for Eric and the Cantorettes, as Raw Story points out, is to try to drive a wedge between Obama and the congressional Dems. That's probably the only way that the Republicans can remain relevant in the short term, and it's a damn good way to make it seem to the great unwashed public that it's the Dems, not good old Eric and the Cantorettes who are being obstructionist.

Nothing could be funnier than Cantor making like Obama is reasonable and admirable. It was Cantor, after all, who along with Boehner, led the attempt in mid-2008 to scare the crap out of Jewish voters by claiming that Obama had called Israel a "constant sore" that "infect[s] all our foreign policy." As repeatedly pointed out by the man conducting the interview in which the comments were supposedly made, this was a gross and deliberate misrepresentation of what Obama had said. Obama said that the "Middle East conflict," not "Israel," was a constant sore affecting all our foreign policy. Nor have Cantor or Boehner retracted their..lies..as far as I know. No sir, nothing partisan (or dishonorable) about that little election ploy.

And Cantor was one of the lead Republican jackasses who stood in public and claimed, with a straight face, that the reason the first bailout bill failed in the House was Pelosi's "partisan" speech the day before the vote, in which Pelosi had the audacity to suggest that Bush policies had led to the need for the bailout. According to the Cantorettes, as many as a dozen brave and resolute Republicans had planned to vote for the bailout before Pelosi talked mean to them. These public servants then supposedly decided to kill a financial package that they presumably really thought was necessary...that'll show her!!

So the congregation's leaders have decided on their tactics in the battle against all that might be good for the public at large: Call Nancy liberal and partisan in a whiny, offended tone, and try to convince both the public and Pelosi that Obama is at odds with her. The chant has begun. All hail the chanters. Or is that the Cantors?

It's good to know that the "party of ideas" still doesn't have any.