Harry Reid and Alec Baldwin: Teaching Lessons to Rude, Thoughtless Little Pigs Everywhere:
The Rude Pundit has not met one parent who believes that Alec Baldwin should be condemned for getting angry at and yelling at his daughter in a phone message. The general consensus was, "Was he a dick? Sure. Welcome to parenting." Now, the Rude Pundit doesn't know a whole lot of parents of that new school "oh, isn't precious so precious for her preciousness" bullshit that passes for parenting among a population of adults who are filled with guilt for having jobs and lives that don't begin and end with little precious. Every mom and dad with whom the Rude Pundit brought up Baldwin's end-of-his-fuckin'-rope blast at his 11-year old daughter reacted by saying, "Jesus, you think that's bad? Lemme tell you what my dad said to me." Followed by some story of how a father called his son a "spoiled prick" or, in the funniest case, just by the sound of a raspberry (as in, "Hey, (raspberry), pass the salt") for a full week.

All of the grown-ups seemed well-adjusted and not horribly scarred and rendered impotent or some such shit for the verbal abuse. Most even agreed that, even if Baldwin was paying a visit to Assholeland, sometimes a kid needs a verbal beatdown, especially if that kid's being a "rude, thoughtless little pig."

And that's just what Harry Reid's been doing to the Bush administration and congressional Republicans. See, up until now, the Bush White House has been allowed to let their worst childishly indulgent ids run wild and unchecked, with the Republican Congress merely occasionally shaking its collective head and shrugging in a kind of "Well, what are ya gonna do?" way when, say, Alberto Gonzales downgraded the meaning of "torture." At that point, a functioning Congress would have brought Gonzales in, had him drop his pants, and spanked his cheeks bright red.

Reid's become the Supernanny to the bullshit passivism of the previous Republican Congress. In a take-no-shit way, Reid has responded, time and again, to attacks by the White House and the GOP, not allowing them to get away with it, thinking, like John Kerry with the Swift Boat assholes, that if you ignore the behavior it'll go away. Nope. It doesn't work with kids. If you let them get away with one thing, then they'll just keep pushing until they see where the line is. It's called "testing the limits" in good parenting terminology. Reid's laid down the limits, and he's keeping the administration on the kiddie leash.

Check out the throwdown between the gelatinous globule of evil known as Dick Cheney and Reid yesterday. Cheney gets in front of the microphones to say, in essence, that Democrats are pussy little traitors who wanna get ass-fucked by al-Qaeda operatives on the floor of the Senate. Reid, whose office was nearby, responded almost immediately (indeed, he could have come out, whipped out his belt, and chased Cheney out of the building), calling Cheney an "attack dog" who is "sent out" by President Bush, and then dismissing him with "I'm not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody who has a 9 percent approval rating." Goddamn, Alec Baldwin couldn't have done it any better.

What Reid has done is pull the Iraq debate back to the center from the right, back to where one can actually talk about the endgame rather than talking about whether to stay the course or add more troops. His declaration that, under the current policies, the war is lost and that the war cannot be won militarily have merely been reflections of the public. And Reid's anti-war remarks (and it's time we start labeling them that) have not, despite the best efforts of the White House and Fox "news," caused the backlash against Democrats they thought would occur, simply because, for so long, all the administration had to do was throw itself on the ground and scream and roll around and it would get its way.

Democrats are slowly learning what real power is, like the parent who says, "No," firmly, who walks into his teenager's room and tosses the TV and Wii out of the window and says, "Now do your fuckin' homework." They're learning that to be leaders means they have to lead, and Reid is giving a goddamn master class on how to do it.

(Full disclosure: the Rude Pundit was once punched by Kim Basinger. But that's a story for another time.)