Tuesday, June 19, 2012

"That's a Clown Question, Bro."

For some reason, the Beltway pundit crowd always gets puzzled whenever Harry Reid gets badass on them.

It’s no secret that Sen. Harry Reid is a fan of Bryce Harper, the 19-year-old slugger from Las Vegas who’s led the Washington Nationals from the butt of capital-city jokes to first place in the National League’s Eastern Division.

But few ever expected the septuagenarian senator would start emulating the phenom teen’s now-infamous quips.

When confronted with a question Reid didn’t feel like answering at his weekly press availability, Reid turned and told a reporter: “That’s a clown question, bro.”

Harper said the same thing to a Canadian reporter last week who asked him if he would celebrate hitting a home run against the Toronto Blue Jays with a beer. Harper is above the legal drinking age in Canada.

Reid invoked Harper’s line when a reporter asked him what he thought of Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, saying the Republicans were going to wait to fully respond to President Barack Obama’s announcement last Friday that DREAM-Act eligible youth could start applying for work visas until Mitt Romney presented his response.

And apparently, they're further confounded by "Abuelito" Reid's ability to shame the G-O-TEA by simply unmasking their crazed extremism. They just didn't know how to handle President Obama's recent announcement on immigration policy, so they clumsily tried to spin away their filibusters against the DREAM Act. I guess they figured that was their least bad option, since they're winning over no new supporters with their xenophobia.

Someone must have told them to wake up and smell the polling.

The latest poll from Bloomberg was conducted after the president’s June 15 directive, which applies to undocumented immigrants under 30 years old who were brought to the United States before the age of 16, have been in the country for at least five years and graduated from high school, earned a GED or served in the military. In the nationwide survey, 64 percent of likely voters agree with the president’s decision, while 30 percent disagree. Sixty-six percent of independents — a crucial portion of the electorate that will likely decide the presidential race — support the policy.

Although Obama insisted that he bypassed Congress to advance the policy because it was “the right thing to do,” it is hard to ignore the political shrewdness of the move. The policy could prove to be a galvanizing force among the nation’s largest ethnic minority group. A poll on Monday showed Latino voters in five swing states are much more enthusiastic about Obama in the wake of the move.

Obama has also placed his general election opponent in a political quandary. Mitt Romney, who took a hardline position on immigration during the Republican nomination contest, has actively avoided the issue since the president’s Friday announcement. The presumptive Republican nominee may now be handcuffed, stuck between potentially alienating his party’s base — the Bloomberg poll shows 56 percent of Republicans oppose the president’s policy — and disenchanting a voting bloc whose influence on American elections will only grow. Obama’s move will affect upwards of 800,000 undocumented immigrants.

This just further complicates Republicans' dilemma. After all, "TEA" fueled radical righties like Romney have been the ones using racism immigration to whip the "tea party" into a frenzy. No matter how hard they try to spin it, that's the reality behind the spin.

And now, they're angry that their anti-immigrant strategy is blowing up in their faces. So what does the G-O-TEA do? Simple, just try to blame someone else and distract with something else...

That is, if Republicans can finally agree on a response. I wonder if Dean Heller will say anything soon. Ah, why even bother? That's such a clown question, bro.

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