I Am Starting to Love the New GOP

The Democrats don't know how to run a party. The Republicans?  Oh man, do they know how to par-tay!  How do you deal with Michelle Bachmann, who is one of the looniest folks in the party and now self-appointed Tea Party leader?  Well, if you are the Democrats, you would wring your hands and do nothing (remember how they handled Lieberman?)  But the GOP is, indeed, the Grand Old Party.  Not only do they deny her a seat she is coveting on Ways and Means, so that she cannot get her hands on the levers of tax policy, but then they put her on the House Intelligence Committee.*  Yep, a committee where she cannot talk that much about what she learns!

As one observer told Politico, "If you're looking for media and controversy, that's not the committee to be on." That's particularly rough for Bachmann, powered as she is by media attention.

You just have to admire the Republicans on this.  They will not be able to control the monster that they created, I am sure, but they can try.  And, yes, this is officially the first schadenfreude post of 2011. It took only three days.





*  I am interested in intelligence committees these days because they are related to the larger question of how do legislatures oversee their militaries.  The answer in British-style parliaments I have found is that they don't.  Some day more to come on that.