Wednesday opinion.
NY Times:
Referring to Mr. Lieberman’s plan to forgo re-election, Bill Curry, a prominent Democrat who served with Mr. Lieberman in the State Senate, said, "It’s the first thing he’s done in 10 years to make Connecticut Democrats completely happy."
Tom Jensen/PPP:
You have to give Connecticut Senators credit for this: they can read the writing on the wall. When it became clear Chris Dodd was not going to be able to survive his poor approval numbers he got out and it looks like Lieberman's doing the same thing.
EJ Dionne on what Teddy Roosevelt said when he was shot:
Roosevelt was quite resentful of the attacks against him from all of these sources. And he was not shy about suggesting that those attacks had incited the man who had just shot him. Here's what he said. I have italicized passages that seem most relevant to our current debate. ...
Now, friends, of course, I do not know, as I say, anything about him; but it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers in the interest of not only Mr. Debs but of Mr. Wilson and Mr. Taft.
Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party; and now I wish to say seriously to all the daily newspapers, to the Republicans, the Democrat, and Socialist parties, that they cannot, month in month out and year in and year out, make the kind of untruthful, of bitter assault that they have made and not expect that brutal, violent natures, or brutal and violent characters, especially when the brutality is accompanied by a not very strong mind; they cannot expect that such natures will be unaffected by it.
I want to thank Graham Smith of Natonal Public Radio for calling this speech to my attention. It is quite a remarkable thing to read now. Neither he nor I think Roosevelt's comments settle the matter under debate at the moment. But speaking for myself, I do think that pondering TR's remarks is helpful because it puts the current conversation in context. Recent critics of violent talk in our politics are by no means the first Americans to suggest -- well, let's just cite TR -- that individuals can "be inflamed to acts of violence by . . . awful mendacity and abuse." Exactly how that fits in to our contemporary discussion, I'll leave to you to decide.
Michael Kinsley:
Any decision to put politics aside is inevitably political. A politician will put politics aside when it is politically helpful to do so. Obama clearly made the right call, under the circumstances. His poll numbers are already up. He is a statesman again, for the moment. But the circumstances were created largely by the political instincts of his political enemies, who are no less his enemies than they were a week ago.
Even more remarkably, in the past week, the question of whether a carefully planned assassination attempt on a member of the United States Congress might have had anything to do with politics has been mocked into oblivion. Well, let’s see. The dominant theme of Loughner’s ravings was suspicion of the government. He apparently didn’t believe in paper money and thought only gold has value. He believed the government was responsible for Sept. 11. And so on. This is not a random collection of nutty opinions. There is a theme to it, and it is not simply that the guy was crazy.
Eugene Robinson:
In the spirit of civil discourse, I'd like to humbly suggest that Sarah Palin please consider being quiet for a while. Perhaps a great while.
Greg Sargent:
It's becoming more and more obvious that polling on whether the public supports repeal of health reform turns very, very heavily on the question wording. Specifically: Polls that offer a straight up choice -- do you support full repeal, or do you support letting the law stand as is? -- show more support for repeal.
But polls that take a finer-grained approach by offering a range of options, including partial repeal and expanding the law, find less support for doing away with it entirely.
WaPo:
Republican claims that the new health-care law will hurt the country's fragile economic recovery and inflate the deficit resonate with the public, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. But few opponents of the law advocate an immediate, wholesale repeal of the legislation. ...
(Recent polls on repeal yield very different answers depending on how the question is asked and how many answer categories respondents are offered. In every iteration of the question, a relatively split verdict on the law appears intact.)
Democracy Corps:
The media pundits and Washington conventional wisdom say deficit reduction and cutting government spending are the top priorities for the nation; yet, the Republican Congress has prioritized health care repeal and Social Security cuts (which are on the table for the first time.) They could not have it more wrong. It is jobs, stupid.