There Is A Sickness in the Senate

Collegiality taken too far becomes clubbiness, and clubbiness is just on the other side of a fine line from corruption.

The Democratic Senate leadership is veering ever so close to crossing that line.

Tennessee Senator Bob Corker said yesterday that a crisis like the U.S. automakers’ fight for survival can create opportunities by forcing people to look at things in new ways.

The first-term Republican might just as well have been talking about his own career. . . .

"I’m hard-pressed to think of another member who’s been here such a short period of time who’s made such an impression on colleagues of both sides of the aisle," says Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Majority Leader Harry Reid seconded McConnell’s assessment. "I’ve been extremely impressed with Bob Corker," says Reid, a Nevada Democrat. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat, says Corker did a "magnificent job." . . .

[Chris] Dodd says wage-reduction demands had more to do with jabbing the Democrats’ loyal union constituency than with reforming the automobile industry. . . . Still, "you’ll hear no criticism from me about how Bob Corker handled himself," Dodd says. "I respect him immensely for stepping up and making the effort."

Let's make this very plain.  Bob Corker just led the charge to kill the American auto industry, and with it some 10% of the American economy, because he wasn't allowed to bust the UAW.  As such, Bob Corker is definitionally one of the most traitorous and despicable human beings ever to track slime across the floors of the Senate. He is attempting to take advantage of the financial crisis to literally dismantle the American middle class. He is beneath the contempt with which partisans regard even their most radical and craven domestic political opponents.  And to see three of the most prominent leaders of the party that portrays itself as the party of working Americans line up to commend this sanctimonious puppet of big money, this enemy of working Americans . . . well, it's disgusting.  There's really no other word for it.

There is a sickness in the Senate if the people who are supposed to fight for working Americans have anything but utter revulsion for Bob Corker.