Reply #8: More R for rabid comments

[Zan_of_Texas]

As Mark Weisbrot wrote in an article published by the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, Republican lawmakers responded to Senator Boxer, and to Representative Tubbs-Jones and her colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, "with howls of derision." Some engaged in ad hominem tactics, labeling the objections "base" and "outrageous" (David Hobson, R-Ohio), and calling the objectors "aspiring fantasy authors" of "wild conspiracy theories," whose behaviour exemplified "their party's primary strategy to obstruct, to divide, to destroy" (Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio).

Others denounced the debate itself as "a travesty" (Senator Rick Santorum, R-Pennsylvania), a "squandering time" by people "who persist in beating a dead horse" (Senator George Voinovich, R-Ohio); or, more gravely, as an exercise that "in the midst of a global war on terrorism <...> clearly emboldens those who would in fact undermine the prospect of democracy" (David Dreier (R-California), and "an assault against the institutions of our representative democracy" by the "X-Files wing" of the Democratic Party (Tom DeLay, R-Texas).

--taken not from the Congressional Record, but from an excellent long piece just published:

Michael Keefer:
"The Strange Death of American Democracy: Endgame in Ohio"
Global Research
January 24, 2005
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE501A.html