DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE….If you want some entertainment, be sure to read Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ article in the October Monthly about Patrick McHenry, the latest in a long line of Stepford Republicans to be elected to Congress:
In the nine months since he came to Washington, McHenry has cultivated a role as a kind of fraternity pledge for the House leadership, willing to do the dirty work on behalf of crusades that the rest of his caucus will no longer touch. He was still pumping Social-Security privatization this summer, months after the GOP leadership had given up on the bill. He was still attacking Terri Schiavo’s husband after other Republicans, with an eye toward opinion polls, clammed up. And in June, he was summoned by the cable networks to defend Karl Rove after it began to appear likely that the president’s chief strategist had identified Valerie Plame as a CIA agent while talking to reporters.
McHenry is perhaps the most successful and precocious of the endless string of those guys, the youngish Republican representatives who show up on cable television to defend the indefensible….
You will be unsurprised to learn that McHenry got his start in the North Carolina chapter of the College Republicans.
