Oh my, Village leaders are up in arms about that nobody Grover Norquist
by digby
I think everyone knows that I'm not Grover Norquist's biggest fan. But this comment from Claire McCaskill is repulsive:
"Everybody's elevated Grover. I met him for the first time this AM. Nice to meet him. But, you know, who is he?"
Cokie Roberts just said a similar thing on This Week: "Who is he?"
Everyone at that round table knows very well that Grover Norquist has run the most important conservative meeting in DC for two decades. He's also an American citizen and a very successful activist who managed to get a bunch of DC elites to adhere to a principle that their voters strongly believe in, which seems to be the real problem. I happen to think it's an absurd principle that has resulted in America coming ever closer to a banana republic (and I'm not personally unhappy to see him on the hot seat) but he has every right to do it. Watching these people deride him as some "nobody" is sickening.
Who the hell is Cokie Roberts and why is she on my TV every Sunday dispensing stale conventional wisdom and pretending that she's just an average common sense American who believes "we" should all be willing to "sacrifice" our medicare and Social Security? She is the privileged daughter of a famous political star and a Villager by birth. Why is she more legitimate than Grover Norquist? Or any other American?
This is Village behavior at its worst. Grover is getting in the way of their hysterical deficit fetish and its demands for human sacrifice so he is being exiled as a non-person. I don't think he's right about taxes, obviously, but I certainly think he has a right to agitate against them. I only wish we had some ideological activists on the left who were as good at it.
Update: I should have reiterated my (and Ezra Klein's) earlier point that Grover has already won. And the Villagers all profit from it.
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