Kind of Surprising
By John Cole May 26th, 2010
This took me by surprise:
A big step forward for the push to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell: Senator Ben Nelson, who has been aggressively lobbied for months by gay rights groups, is announcing that he’ll support the repeal compromise.
I figured we would lose Webb and Lincoln and Nelson and pick up Snowe, Collins, and maybe a couple other Republicans.
Posted in Gay Rights are Human Rights
I suspect this will pass by wider margins, and a lot more easily, than most people are thinking.
The GOP is hoping to use it like a boot to the hornet’s nest that is the teabaggers, so I expect no more than pro-forma opposition from them.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
@The Moar You Know:
I agree. Polling on this is overwhelming. Only the C-streeters will oppose this, and probably McCain if only because he’s a dick.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
I love it when politicians surprise us.
And I agree with this, @The Moar You Know: I suspect this will pass by wider margins, and a lot more easily, than most people are thinking.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:26 pm
The only hope for conservatives is avoiding a vote on the issue. If it comes up for a vote, a lot of them will vote “yes” (even if they really don’t like it cuz teh gays make them feel icky).
May 26th, 2010 at 12:26 pm
What about Scott Brown? Has he come out one way or the other on this one? Or is he still in the closet?
May 26th, 2010 at 12:29 pm
this is about the armed services committee vote, not the floor vote. They want to win this in committee first. Nelson, Bayh, Byrd, and Webb are all on the committee and up to now, they were all on the fence.
Scott brown (who’s on the fucking committee) says he will vote against it.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:30 pm
This peeling off moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats is no way to jam a bill down the people’s throat, I tells ya.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
webb is a no.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
@The Moar You Know:
Well, the house gop plans to vote in a bloc against the entire defense budget because of the amendment. All 176 of them. Every single last one of the them. even the closet gay gop congressmen, like Patrick McHenry.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
@Comrade Jake:
Brown said he’s voting no, hiding behind the “waiting for the study” excuse.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
@Comrade Jake: Unfortunately, Scott Brown is a no which surprised me almost as much as Ben Nelson saying yes.
It looks like Webb is going for a repeat when he was against women in the military.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:35 pm
It’s crazy how insisting legislators legislate actually gets them to…legislate. That Obama and his crazy Jedi mind tricks!
May 26th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
What, politicians stepping up and doing the right thing? I’m flummoxed!
May 26th, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Wow, it’s almost as if lobbying congress is more useful than chaining yourself to walls and yelling at the president. How strange.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
And with only 80 percent support, ramming this bill down all our throats will mean that a 20 percent majority will be forced to have this bill rammed down their throats.
And don’t tread on me! Also, too.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:45 pm
@middlewest: don’t forget freaking out on blogs.
number one way to get the president’s attention is to write a freak out on a blog.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:48 pm
Wait. Jim Webb was against women in the military?
May 26th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
I honestly thought that the GOP would have been more on board with this when those stories of the Arabic speaking soldiers getting booted out broke.
I guess I learned that fear of teh gheys trumps fear of the teh Mooslims.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:53 pm
Like with immigration, gay rights is an issue in which the Talibangelicals/ Confederates have painted the GOP into a corner.
Which is an artless seque into an off-topic link to Dana Milbanks column on the new GOP website, which is a treasure trove of hilarity.
Sample suggestion from the wingnut faithful:
A decade ago I would have assumed this was Democratic pranking; after listening to Palin/ Bachmann/ Beck….I take it at face value.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:54 pm
@Allison W.: in the 70s. he changed his mind in the 80s.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
What, did some gay billionaire offer to hire Ben Nelson on the board of a company after he retires?
May 26th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
@El Cid: maybe Geffen made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
@Violet:
weird, isn’t it? You’d think there were like, branches of government and all.
May 26th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
@liberty60: I’m pretty sure that one is a spoof. Not entirely sure, mind you.
dms
May 26th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
@Allison W.: Yes. Aggressively.
May 26th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
No way you lose Lincoln at the moment.
Before she found herself in a run-off in the Democratic primary, you’d absolutely lose her because she’d be thinking about being reelected in a conservative, red state.
Now she needs to court liberals and others who vote in Democratic primaries. She’ll vote in favor of this out of a desire for survival.
May 26th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
@liberty60: I can’t wait for the ducks and the turtles’ take on this.’ Still, there is a tradition of this sort of logic to get around the prohibitions of fasting. Such as, the strange and wonderful generation of the Barnacle Goose. Well, here too, don’t want anyone to miss the actual floating on water stage
May 26th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
@liberty60: Wow. Those quotes are some good moron vintage right there. Very tasty.
May 26th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
@liberty60: This web site sounds like great fun to play with. I think I’ll be making many suggestion right after I press the TOR button on my browser. (Warning: while tor anonymizes, it makes stuff slooooooooow. LIke really slow. Slowity slow slow. But you ip isn’t attached to anything you do.)
May 26th, 2010 at 1:14 pm
I was really hoping Webb would change on this.
Yes he was also against women in the military way back in the 70’s. He eventually changed his mind (IIRC he eventually became a big supporter of women in the military…but I might be thinking of someone else).
I was hoping he would change it a little quicker this time.
May 26th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
@liberty60:
Most of the ones I read are spoofs. Two tells:
1) Limited use of the Jesus key.
2) All the words are spelled correctly. Conservatives think the red squigglies give the words extra emphasis.
And if any of them end in Also., it’s clearly, obviously a spoof, and a rookie at that.
May 26th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
@dmsilev: I wouldn’t be completely sure it’s satire. There’s an article in today’s Denver Post about a group in Grand Junction that took a petition to the local school board demanding that global warming no longer be taught in science class, because it’s “unproven” and “scares the kids.”
May 26th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
@dmsilev:
I once ran across a guy who insisted that whales are fish because of the story of Jonah. The logic went that because both the original Hebrew manuscripts and the KJV translations of the Bible described the thing that swallowed Jonah as a “great fish” and a “whale,” respectively, and that the KJV is a perfect translation of the infallible word of God (who speaks Hebrew, I guess), whales were, by necessity, fish. That they breathe air, have warm blood, and nurse their young via mammary glands was all incidental. God said it was a fish and a whale so it must be both.
So I’ll assume that the comment was simple nutpicking. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was genuine.
May 26th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
Poe’s law (religious fundamentalism) — “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”
May 26th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
@Allison W.:
Yep.
May 26th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Was it really Sen. Nelson, or just his hologram?
May 26th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
@Mike Kay:
Yeah, but you know, a vote against repealing DADT is actually a vote for…..
HITLER
!!
At least according to a spokesman for the American Family Association:
One Mr. Bryan Fischer explains:
If it weren’t “so gay”, I’d suggest Mr. Fischer has seen one too many reruns of “Cabaret” (or didn’t realize that it wasn’t a documentary).....
May 26th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
@eric:
Wow, that’s surprising.
May 26th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
What the fuck is wrong with Webb? I just cannot understand his objection.
May 26th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Interesting: Lindsay Graham’s website just posted a statement saying that he’s opposed—but mostly just because he doesn’t like the idea of voting to repeal DADT, and then seeking feedback from the military on implementation.
May 26th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
But, but, Obama didn’t use his executive powers just like Bush to get rid of DADT. Worst president EVAH!
May 26th, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Let’s wait and see how dude actually votes.
I predict a bait and switch.
May 26th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
@Martin
I think that it’s insulting to dicks to call McCain a dick.
May 26th, 2010 at 9:47 pm
This is the kind of thing that brings me around to vote for BN, even while I’m grinding my teeth about the other stuff he’s done. I suppose Hagel might have wound up voting for something like this as well. But Nebraska isn’t going to elect any Republicans half as sane as Hagel in the next decade. So BN is a good bit better than our other options.
May 26th, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Oh come on. Lindsey’s opposed because he doesn’t want to lose best excuse ever to stay in the closet (he’s an Air Force JAG.) Or more charitably he thinks icky gays should be careful not to make the straights uncomfortable.
May 27th, 2010 at 12:31 am
@RSR:
More like Mystique took his place.
May 27th, 2010 at 9:02 am