Fighting Dems

I've often said that Rahm Emanuel may be an asshole, but he's our asshole. And sometimes, it's good to have an asshole on your side.

After Dick Cheney's assertion that he's not part of the executive branch, Emanuel's office put out this graphic picking up on my Fourthbranch idea:



And he released this statement:

Today, we discovered that everything we learned in U.S. government class was wrong. Evidently, the Vice President does not consider himself a part of the executive branch, and therefore believes he can obstruct meaningful oversight and avoid being held accountable. If the Vice President truly believes he is not a part of the executive branch, he should return the salary the American taxpayers have been paying him since January 2001, and move out of the home for which they are footing the bill.

I wish he'd go further and actually submit that legislation on the House floor. Rahm Emanuel should be used as our Patrick McHenry.

A far less belligerent politician, Tom Harkin, offered this brilliant frame when talking about potential Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg. I don't know if it was by design or not, but I love it:

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin this morning said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is like a “little rich kid” who doesn’t want to get his hands dirty with the sort of retail politics involved in presidential bids.

“Mr. Bloomberg, whom I don’t know real well — I’ve met him a few times — kind of reminds me of the little rich kid that if he can’t have it his way he’s going to take his little balls and go home,” Harkin said in a conference call with Iowa Independent and other media [...]

Harkin said Bloomberg, if he is eyeing an independent presidential run, appears to be wanting to “take all his money and do his own thing like this little rich kid that doesn’t know how to get along with anyone else.”

Harkin said that if Bloomberg were a true leader he would have showcased his skills in the two-party structure.

“Why isn’t he a leader in the Republican Party?” said Harkin, a Democrat. “Why didn’t he take leadership positions in the Democratic Party when he was a Democrat?” [...]

“It sounds like he doesn’t want to go around Iowa,” Harkin said. “He doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. He doesn’t want to go out and go to town meetings and he doesn’t want to go in people’s homes and stuff like that. He kind of wants to ride above it.”

There's an upside to Bloomberg changing parties because a lot of citizens in this country have drifted in the same way. The downside is the notion that he's constantly ducking the mechanisms of party government and changing his status for political expediency. And painting him as a spoiled rich kid is an absolutely brilliant way to portray that.

Some pretty good rapid repsonse by the Dems there.