You are a bad man, a very, very bad man!!!

All I ever hear about is what good men Joe Lieberman and Lincoln Chafee are. I have unloaded on Joe Lieberman already, so today I will set my sights on the honorable Senator from the state of Rhode Island. Lincoln Chafee was appointed to his seat after the death of his father, Senator John Chafee, died in office in 1999. He won re-election in 2000 and is up for re-election this year.

Lincoln Chafee is a member of the Grand Old Party, just like his father, representing the very blue state of Rhode Island. Like his father he is a fiscal conservative and a social moderate bordering on liberal. He is opposed to the death penalty. He favors a woman’s right to choose, funding for embryonic stem cell research. He is a deficit hawk who is not opposed at the outset to raising taxes. He takes these decisions on a case by case basis. He opposed President Dumb ass’ (I mean Dubya) fiscally foolish tax cuts for the richest 1% of Americans. On paper Chafee could almost be a candidate worth voting for. So why do I loath him? That is because he is a Republican.

It may be that he stands on the ethical and just side of most all issues, but he still votes for the Republican Party leadership in the United States Senate. That means that a vote for Lincoln Chafee is a vote for Trent Lott and Bill Frist. Trent Lott, a man that said the country would be a better place if more people had agreed with racist, anti-integration Presidential Candidate and Senator Strom Thurmond. Bill Frist, a surgeon who decided to diagnose Terry Shiavo based on a few minutes of videotape. A vote for Lincoln Chafee, in spite of his heroic resistance to his own Party’s foolhardy stance on the War in Iraq and the struggle against Terrorism, is a vote for continued George W. Bush and Dick “Shoot my friends in the face” Cheney. It is a vote for the continuation of an impotent legislative branch and the continued domination of the executive branch.

Lincoln Chafee is a man who votes his conscience on legislation in the United States Senate and when electing a President (he wrote in the name of Dubya’s papa), unfortunately he doesn’t vote his conscience when electing Senate leadership.

I don’t know much about Sheldon Whitehouse, but I do know one thing about him; he’s no Republican. Fresh blood is needed. We need a strong and oppositional legislative branch. There has never been a more important time to be a blatantly partisan liberal. Our ideas are better. But honestly, even if, like the GOP says, Democrats had no ideas; no ideas are better than BAD IDEAS and stubbornness.

We need a Congress that will ask hard questions and fight back when the President tries to re-write our Constitution. To quote a very wise man: Mr. President, I knew James Madison, James Madison was a friend of mine, you sir and Harriet Myers and Alberto Gonzalez are no James Madison.

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