Judd Gregg Is a Wimp!

[babylonsister]

Judd Gregg Is a Wimp!

by John Batchelor

John Batchelor is radio host of the John Batchelor Show in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

The surprise withdrawal of the Commerce nominee is another blow for Obama. But The Daily Beast's John Batchelor says it's the GOP that should be embarrassed.



Senator Judd Gregg abandoned President Obama's nomination to be Secretary of Commerce just nine days after receiving the nod, not for any mysterious fever of principles, but rather because Gregg is good example of what is wrong with the Republican Party after Karl Rove and President George Bush turned it into clumsy crybabies. Why did Gregg quit? Was it because White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel means to strip the Census Bureau from Commerce and turn it into an election tool, or allow it to be run by a Republican, which was Emanuel’s idea in the first place? Or was it because Gregg couldn't stand up to the tantrum he was hearing from the enraged GOP over the Emanuel plotting? Yes to both, but then again, more importantly, why did Gregg agree to join up with the Obama administration to begin with?

When Obama uses the word “bipartisan,” does he mean an absence of conflict, giving a hug to a co-worker, a chorus of cheerful mates like the Seven Dwarves?

The answer is that Gregg is not a bipartisan-minded Republican conservative. Gregg is a nothing, not conservative, not liberal, not partisan or bipartisan: a blank, a cipher, an empty cabinet, to be pushed and pulled by bullies like Rove once upon a time and Emanuel now. If Gregg was unique in this role as party busboy, we would be safer, but he represents a sizeable amount of what is left in the Republican Senate and not a few of what passes for leadership in the House. RINO? Republican In Name Only? Worse. In this present global crisis, these politicians without a backbone are parasites, sycophants and in the worst instances like now, cowards. More Greggs? After the stimulus folly, they may be all Greggs, weak-kneed creatures to be rolled by Rahm Emanuel, who rolled himself in the end.

Judd Gregg was always an insignificant journeyman Republican politician. At 62, the tall, craggy, and dull New Hampshire scion has been in public office since 1978, all his adult life on the public payroll, as a state officer, congressman, governor and senator. His father was also a governor of the Granite State before him, and Gregg has no claims on originality—another Exeter-educated Ivy Leaguer who drifted into politics like some drift into bridge playing—a man without need of principles as long as he used his father's name and his elitist tone. Greggs's undistinguished congressional career—30 years of chumminess and obtuseness—has produced no credible record of achievement but it has most recently produced failure after failure for the party and the country. Not just because Gregg was the chair of the giveaway Senate Committee of Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and then the chair of the giveaway Committee on the Budget, overseeing the ghastly Bush spending sprees to bribe the public for the 2004 victories and then for the 2006 losses, but also because when the country needed him the most, during the stock market crash of last September and October, Gregg turned yellow.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-02-13/who-blew-up-judd-gregg/full/