More Feinstein Fun
.My reactions are probably out of proportion at this stage, but Senator Dianne Feinstein drives me crazy. Her actions on the Southwick nomination were terrible, she’s way further to the right than her constituency, and then there’s stuff like this:
After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage and French toast, Bush popped back for what [Feinstein] described as a frank two-hour conversation, mostly about foreign policy.
“I found the discussion extraordinarily positive,” Feinstein said. “I came away with a very different view about him.”
As for the president’s performance on the ground?
“It was a wonderful thing to see, to be candid,” Feinstein said. “I saw a warm, caring human being.”
—Matier & Ross, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 Oct 2007
Just amazing. Why not express support for Bush’s atrocious (and deeply unpopular) foreign policy and provide him and his party with a line that can do nothing but help them? “A warm, caring human being”? Presumably that fits in with her view after their foreign policy discussion, and can any rational observer claim that Bush’s foreign policy is “warm and caring”?
Feinstein is a senior Senator from a left-leaning state who was once mayor of the allegedly most-liberal city in the United States. Yet it’s clearly too much to ask that she represent the values of the people who voted for her. No, she prefers to be a useful tool for an administration that is mired in disgrace.
I know that Democrat and Republican are just labels, and that the two parties are mostly just different outward skins for the same policy skeleton. But still, sometimes it’s so outrageous that it gets to me, and Feinstein seems to reach that egregious high note more and more often. It’s partly that she’s allegedly representing me.
Of course, she, and Bush, and the rest of the ruling faction, regard tehir role as guiding, not representing, the herd of sheep that is the American public. Guiding according to their lights, not according to what will benefit us most. Crossing party lines is meaningless to her, because the lines are largely imaginary anyway, set up for pacification purposes, to make it look as if there were some hope of actual representation.
Some among the herd, among us, have an awareness that this isn’t quite right. I know it’s wrong, so I fight it—with bleating. Bleating on the internet, that Feinstein will probably never hear, and which she would dismiss anyway (why should she take the counsel of sheep?) as she moves the herd along.
I have an urge to re-read Animal Farm.