Ritual Sacrifice Failure
by digby
Greg Sargent made a fascinating observation this morning regarding the GOP's refusal to to the easy thing and ritually sacrifice Joe Barton:
The question is, Why haven't Republicans removed him? As best as I can determine, Republicans believe there's no political percentage in doing so because Dems will continue attacking them as stooges for Big Oil no matter what they do. Republicans don't appear to think the Barton attack is as effective as, say, attacking them for taking Big Oil's campaign contributions. They think attacks featuring the unknown Barton will sound like so much Beltway white noise.
Republicans appear to think that any discussion of oil has a downside for Dems, because it allows Republicans to keep pointing out that Obama has failed to stop the spill.
Republicans are always much less likely to do this sort of thing (unlike Democrats who seem to relish it) but in this case it truly does seem to be an obvious move with little substantial downside. It's not like they don't have a huge number of substitute oil whores to replace him with.
Sargent's take on the GOP rationale sounds right to me. And I would guess they are also calculating that they need to appease Limbaugh and the rest of the gasbags to some degree since some Republicans very mildly rebuked them for defending Barton's comments. But is their calculation that "any discussion of oil has a downside for Dems because it allows the Republicans to point out that Obama has failed to stop the spill" even rational? I agree that they might believe it, but I think they're cracked. People may be frustrated with the government's response to the spill but nobody thinks Obama has the singular power to stop it. It's like a man made volcano or tsunami.
What they want is for him to make sure the government is doing everything it can to deal with the fallout and more importantly to hold BP accountable for causing this catastrophe. And that's where Barton comes in. He apologized to BP --- and Republican gasbags everywhere are holding him up as a hero for doing it while Republican politicians are acting as if it's no big deal.
It's true that Barton as an individual is unknown and that whether or not he keeps his committee ranking can be seen as an inside the beltway phenomenon. But his comments play into the deepest, most embedded negative stereotypes about Republicans and big business. It's not just what he said --- it's the accumulation of decades adulation of CEOs and subservience to the cult of the corporation that the Republicans represent. (It's not say that Democrats aren't just as subservient, but they don't have the reputation, largely due to the conservatives' insistence that they are socialist lackeys of the Bolshevik unions and hippie communes.)
The fact is that Barton's comments sound perfectly predictable coming from the mouth of any Republican. And that is what should worry the GOP about them and why they should have just made the ritual sacrifice. Of course, what Cantor's unable to admit is that he's completely hamstrung in doing so both by his corporate masters and his insane rank and file who are laboring under the illusion that they are typical of the great majority of Americans even in the face of surveys which show that the country very much approved of Obama's "shakedown" of BP. The congressional Republican leadership simply can't do anything more than try to split the difference.
As Sargent points out, even Joe Scarborough can see what a problem this presents for them:
"This hurts the Republican Party. This hurts the Republican brand. Joe Barton is the most powerful Republican on the Hill when it comes to energy policy, and that shows his mindset. Does it not?"
Yes it does, but short of changing their policy and philosophy --- and convincing the American people they mean it -- there's nothing they can do about it. They happily made their bed with big business many moons ago and now that big business has poured oil all over it they have to lie in the greasy mess right along with them.
.