Reply #41: To be fair, Murtha's rep was that he was an earmark king

[Kagemusha]

And people were kinda shocked when he turned against Iraq because he's considered a rather conservative Democrat to begin with. Except for his war stance, he's not the Hill's first candidate to come to mind when a liberal is mentioned. (OTOH, Pelosi fits that a lot more by their standards.)

I'll be blunt, though. I wasn't thrilled by the idea of, for example, having Rangel straddling the aorta of government as Chair of Ways and Means, like the Republicans were scaring people about. This batch of Democrats elected to the House is by no means perfect. It's just that besides slanting left, I, and many others, viewed the Republicans there as just SO horrible that it didn't matter that the Democrats would not be perfect - the Republicans just had to go and the damage they could inflict, severely curtailed by minority status.

We can only hope that the people getting positions like House intel chair aren't a complete drag. Fortunately, a Democratic majority in the Senate means that the Senate has committees to pick up the slack in some cases, possibly on Intel issues, but, well, holding hearings was never going to get THAT much done anyway, in and of itself, unfortunately. Not under this President.