{"id":41598,"date":"2014-02-05T06:00:18","date_gmt":"2014-02-05T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41598"},"modified":"2014-02-04T07:38:40","modified_gmt":"2014-02-04T13:38:40","slug":"the-sum-of-all-putridity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41598","title":{"rendered":"The Sum Of All Putridity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Barone writing in the WashEx <\/em>notes that Henry Waxman and George Miller, the last two members of the Democrat “Class of 1974” – the huge class of liberal Democrats that swept into office after Watergate – to have “served” continuously since ’74, are retiring. \u00a0(Two other members – Chuck Grassley, one of few Republicans, and Rick Nolan, who spent three terms, retired in 1980, and was re-elected in 2012, are the only two other members of the class).<\/p>\n

And the class of 74 left a noxious legacy indeed. \u00a0For all the bemoaning of “extremism” and “polarization” that the likes of Lori Sturdevant do (usually blaming it on the Tea Party), it was in fact the “Class of ’74” that got that ball rolling:<\/p>\n

chairmen against whom a certain number of signatures were gathered.<\/p>\n

San Francisco\u2019s Phil Burton, who had shrewdly backed many ’74ers, gathered a sufficient number of signatures for every chairmen. Three were defeated by the newly enlarged caucus, including one, first elected in 1940, who addressed the freshmen as \u201cboys and girls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Election of committee chairmen became routine, and it meant that anyone seeking a chair had better have a voting record in line with the Democrats\u2019 liberal majority. For example, Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, first elected a month before Pearl Harbor, shifted suddenly from Right to Left.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And it was then that the Democrat Party began to truly shed its honorable, post-WW2-era legacy and become the extremist party it is today. \u00a0(It took twenty years for the Congressional GOP to adopt the similar rules).<\/p>\n

And lest you think it was all inside-the-beltway wonkery?<\/p>\n

The Class of 1974 also shifted the House and the congressional Democratic party from hawkish to dovish. One of its first acts in March 1975 was to block funding for South Vietnam when it was under attack by the North. Saigon fell in April.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They coarsened our political discourse, they worked tirelessly to blow up the national debt (with great success!), and they directly aided and abetted genocide, with the blood of millions on their hands.<\/p>\n

Good riddance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Barone writing in the WashEx notes that Henry Waxman and George Miller, the last two members of the Democrat “Class of 1974” – the huge class of liberal Democrats that swept into office after Watergate – to have “served” continuously since ’74, are retiring. \u00a0(Two other members – Chuck Grassley, one of few Republicans, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","category-history-and-its-making"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41598"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41601,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41598\/revisions\/41601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}