Thomas -- who besides having his fling with a Pharma lobbyist received $112,619 in campaign funds from the pharmaceutical industry in the 2004 cycle -- couldn't brook passage of a bill forbidding the state to pay for ED drugs.
In other words, Thomas couldn't vote without Viagra. If there is a better metaphor for the Republican troubles, I haven't heard it.
In a meeting last week, the conservative RSC showed the finale of The Bridge on the River Kwai to celebrate the defeat of the $230 million Alaskan "Bridge to Nowhere" pork project rammed into a highway bill over the summer. When the bridge over the Kwai exploded at the movie's end, the crowd of GOP congressmen cheered. Republicans, celebrating the death of a Republican bridge.
Could any Republican, much less 100 of them, have pulled a stunt like that in public a year ago?
No way. The party's over, George.
After you read that, and you should 'cuz it's a hoot, go read what the WaPo has to say about Taibbi.
Thompson, who committed suicide last February, invented the "gonzo" style in the 1970s by combining on-the-scene reporting, off-the-wall comedy and inventive invective. In the '80s, O'Rourke kept up the gonzo tradition from a conservative perspective. Both were gutsy guys: Thompson rode with the Hells Angels and O'Rourke traveled to various Third World war zones. Taibbi shows his guts by spending time with a group that's far more vicious and dangerous than bikers or guerrillas -- the United States Congress.
Of course, name-calling is easy and anybody can do it, even an Oxycontin-addled Rush Limbaugh. But Taibbi also exhibits a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the inner workings of Congress. Wonks will recognize the aptness of his description, in a story last August, of the House Rules Committee, the place where amendments go to die, as "perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination -- a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish."
Go have some fun.
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