Sad is as stupid does

Last Wednesday, President George W. Bush blasted the Democrat-controlled Congress for failing to "get things done for the American people." As reported by the New York Times, President Bush blames Congress for failing to deliver on any number of items.

[H]e offered a list of areas where Congress "has work to do," including the budget, domestic surveillance, education, housing, trade, veterans' care and the confirmation of judicial nominees. He finished by accusing lawmakers of meddling where they did not belong, with a proposed House resolution condemning Turkey for the mass killing of Armenians nearly a century ago.

"With all these pressing responsibilities," Mr. Bush said, "one thing Congress should not be doing is sorting out the historical record of the Ottoman Empire."

Oddly enough, perhaps Mr. Bush has a bit of a leg to stand on in his critique of Congress. Based on the latest polls, the Congress' approval rating hovers somewhere between 22 and 27 percent, which is still south of a 33.2 percent approval rating for the President. Given the closely divided electorate, the most that either Congress or the President could hope for is approximately 50 percent of Americans approving the job that they do. So the polling results suggest that both the Legislative and the Executive branches have lost the support of their respective bases, with Congress having shed incrementally more supporters than the President.

As might be expected, the root cause of much of the disappointment among Democrats stems from the inability of Congress to advance their agenda. According to the Campaign 08 blog at The Nation's website, Democrats have much for which to be upset.

Grassroots Democrats are rightfully disappointed with their Congress. This year has been a policy disaster. Despite a huge mandate, the new Congress failed to alter Iraq policy – let alone force redeployment. It failed to restore habeas corpus or protect the constitutional rights compromised by the administration – instead granting Bush more power to spy on Americans. Next it will shamelessly consider immunizing companies that illegally spied on Americans – the Scooter Libby approach to accountability.

Beyond being angry over those perceived failures, faithful Democrats are upset over their leadership's reluctance to impeach the President, its awkward handling of the aforementioned Armenian genocide resolution, the inability to craft meaningful immigration "reform" and the inefficacy shown in failing to override Bush's veto of the SCHIP program.

Add to all of this the personal failures of both the House and Senate leadership. For her part, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has done everything from bungle the order of succession in supporting Jack Murtha for House majority leader over her longtime rival Steny Hoyer to playing Aunt Jemima for Syria's Bashar Assad, all to the effect of raising the ire of her Democrat colleagues. She has long been seen as an ineffectual leader by both Republicans and Democrats, and according to syndicated columnist Robert Novak, her lackluster performance as House minority leader had been referred to as "the Nancy problem."

The situation is no better in the Senate. Senator Harry Reid has repeatedly embarrassed himself with his untimely declaration that the Iraq War is "lost," his questionable land deals and his taking money from Indian tribes represented by disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He recently capped all of that off by starting a micturition contest with Rush Limbaugh over a phony "phony soldiers" controversy. By way of some masterful political jiu-jitsu, Limbaugh turned the whole thing into a PR/fund-raising coup, while Reid was left to make lemons into lemonade by way of a surreal speech in the Senate.

All of this serves to reinforce the obvious: as discussed elsewhere, Democrats are victims of the essential nature of liberalism, which is to favor emotion over thought. And the operative emotions of the Left are anger and indignation. In as much as the Democratic Party is really an "anti-party" - that is a party that is the opposite of an intellectually cohesive entity - they will be unable to "proffer an affirmative political agenda that is intellectually consistent." And as rank and file Democrats may soon find out, a party that cannot govern "will seldom be able to garner electoral majorities in as much as voting is an act of affirmation for most Americans."