The BBC Guy is Enraged

Mark Mardell is disgusted  (not to say, just yet,  disgusting).  He thinks that because the Teapublicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives, though not quite in the Senate, during the recently concluded elections, the Democrats, though they still had several months left in office, should've immediately rolled over and let the Teapubs immediately take over things, and not only in the House  -- though it is only one=half,  and some might say the lower half, of the U.S. Congress = but in the entire country as well, though the Congress is only one-third of the main U.S. branches of government..  Mardell thinks that the several big victories that the Democrats have achieved in these last moments of the current "lame duck" session should never have been countenanced, mainly on the grounds that that is not the way things are done in his native England and in other places in the world. 

Mardell bills himself as the BBC's listening post in the U.S,.  But for a listening post for the otherwise generally politically impartial BBC news website, passing glances at his regular column -- and glances are about all that makes them bearable -- reveal that he is obviously partial to the retrogressive Teapublican side of things, and thinks it deplorable that a man of B. Obama's description should be still in office and so impede the Teapubs' burning desire to see the U.S. return to any one of its numerous darker ages, when a man of Obama's description could never have been elected the President,

I don't know if Mardell was writing for the BBC when Obama was elected, but I would bet that in the winter of 2008-2009 he said nothing about the "folly" of "lame duck" sessions when his preferred gang, the GWBush criminals, were still operating from the Oval Office.

He says he can't see the use for "lame duck."   But that is like arguing that a house should be constructed of red brick instead of yellow or brown brick, and I can see easily enough that was just how the "Founding Fathers" built the American House, and I've never heard that feature attacked much at all, and definitely not as often as the Electoral College, the latter being an enigma that is regularly and angrily probed with great energy during each Presidental election and then promptly forgotten and left undisturbed till the next Presidential election.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to the BBC guy that it is merely a matter of the American political calendar being offset, calendar-wise,  from what he says it is in England and all those other presumably more fabulous and enlightened parts of the world, with those still in office being left to finish out their terms before the new office-holders are sworn in..

The Democrats in the House still had three or so months of their terms to get their jobs done (and two-thirds of the Senators still had much more), and so they are to be commended for  stepping up to the plate and finally swinging for the fences and even connecting, instead of continuing to let the Teapubs continue to divert them from their generally worthy goals -- at least much more worthy than the ones we are likely to see coming from the House of Representatives in this next, threatening session that painfully is almost at hand..