Roadblock Blog

As a Presidential candidate, John McCain is outside the purview of RoadblockRepublicans.com, but as Senator John McCain (R - K Street), and more especially as the self-styled paragon of virtue among Republican members of Congress, he's at the heart of the problems we try to address. If John McCain sets the standard for probity in the GOP, then he is the head from which the fish rots.

The hardy young folks in the Texas College Democrats know how to find their junior Senator's home state office in the dark:

"Just go west 'til you smell it, then south 'til you step in it."

They also know it's never too early to ask Santa for an extra-special present next year: a Christmas without a Cornyn in it.

(Oh, yeah -- and a pony, too.)

...comes this typically excellent example of their finestkind online political comic strip, "Town Called Dobson", aimed at one of our favorite Roadblock Republicans herself...

Yesterday, Rep John Boehner (R-OH) Republican Minority Leader in the US House, stormed out of the House chamber to protest what he termed a “politically charged fishing expedition.” Boehner said that he was protesting the Democrats waste of legislative time on silly things like governmental accountability. “Yesterday, the majority leader said that this political stunt would occur today because we have space on the House schedule,” said a clearly pumped-up Boehner, in the Congressional Record.

Larry Craig offers Senate-themed Valentine's Day wishes.

Here at RR.com, we know that it's not enough just to get rid of the Bad Guys -- we also need to make sure we replace them with Good Guys instead.

(And yes, btw, we do use the word "guy" in a totally gender-neutral sense around here -- so Jeanne Shaheen is one of the Good Guys, too.)

Even the dead are political pawns to the Republicans (then again, we already knew that post-September 11). House Republicans, at the bidding of the Bush White House, are upset that House Democrats are voting on contempt citations for Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton today. So they're disrupting proceedings in the House today, calling for "protest votes" and the like that eat up 15 minutes of the day at a time. Well, they just called one such protest vote in the middle of recently-deceased Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos' memorial service, which they certainly knew was taking place. This is akin to forcing people to leave a wake on purpose. The House Republicans and the White House couldn't wait for Lantos' service to be finished before forcing everyone back to the House floor to vote for something silly. They intentionally disrupted a dead man's memorial service for political gain. But as was already noted, the Republicans have been abusing the memory of 3,000 dead for seven years now, so why expect anything new and better from them now.

Sure, we knew as early as 2004 that Halliburton was charging taxpayers millions of dollars, not to mention risking the lives of contractors and their military escorts, to haul “sailboat fuel” back and forth across Iraq, but should we expect the Senator from Caribou to know that sailboats are powered by wind? It's not like she grew up in the shipyards of Bath.

Similarly, when urine and feces dripped from the light fixtures of the $72 million police training college, how was Collins supposed to know this was not a “feature?” Assuming otherwise betrays the same cultural chauvinism that liberals like to point out in all our nation-building efforts.

For the sake of the argument, let's say we don't adopt a “When in Ramadi...” attitude. When I get a flat tire, I just set fire to my truck and buy a new one. I can't be troubled with carrying appropriately-sized wrenches, nor should our brave contractors in Iraq. They would have that much less room for vital sailboat fuel!

Okay, well, maybe that's a little bit harsh. But how often does the chance come along to paraphrase Cato the Elder in a snarky blog post aimed at skewering a Sununu? Not that often, I'll tell you. So let's just run with it for now, shall we?

Old Cato was a Republican of the old school. The really old school, I mean, as in the original Roman Republic, which means "old" as in "B.C." -- and no, that's not a reference to Johnny Hart's long-running comic strip. But Cato wasn't just any old Republican, mind you -- he was a prototypical, in fact probably the prototypical, Roadblock Republican too.

Back in the bad old days, when the Roman legions were duking it out with some upstart Phoenicians in a series of Punic Wars that ran on for almost as many decades as John McCain thinks we should stay in Iraq, Cato the Elder became legendary for constantly repeating the same old obstructionist talking points no matter what the discussion was supposed to be about.

"Carthago delenda est," old Cato the retro-con would shout over and over again, in every speech and every soundbite he could steal, "Carthago delenda est!" That's old-school Latin lingo for "Carthage must be destroyed!" -- which is why it would be a bit over the top for us to shout "Sununu delenda est!" at the top of every blog post here.

After all, we don't really want Sununu to be destroyed -- we only want him to be removed from the Senate, stat. So maybe let's just change that to "Sununu deleted est" instead, shall we? Let's!

It’s not enough just to know that the Republicans in Congress are making it a pervasive point of their pachydermic policy to throw up roadblocks in the path of everything the Democrats are trying to accomplish there.

You also have to ask yourself just what it is that the Roadblock Republicans are trying so hard to defend against the Democrats when they obstruct us so obstreperously in the Senate. What are the most precious platform planks that they’re pushing so hard to protect?

The following video is taking YouTube by storm this morning, and it gives a snarkiliciously stiff poke in the eye at one of the biggest roadblock redoubts of them all — the neocon-crafted, never-ending quagmire conflict in Afghaniraqiranistan: