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GOP Hits the Panic Button
...FauxGate Machinery Kicks Into Overdrive
...Desperate Republicans Realize Just How Close They Are to Losing both House of Congress and the White House

by Tamara Baker

Saturday, April 1, 2000 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (AmpolNS) -- You can hear the klaxons all the way into the heartland.

The GOP has entered full battle-stations mode, as the realization sinks in that they have just entrusted the fate of their party to an unelectable twit.

Republican behavior, outrageous enough already, has begun to take on the flavor of the mad-dog desperation of the Germans in late 1944. They knew in their hearts that the war was lost, but they couldn't ever admit it.

Look at how they've been upping the FauxGate activity. In the past month, we've had HsiaGate (which will come to its deserved end when the judge dismisses the charges and renders the Sentelle-railroaded verdict null and void), E-Mail-Gate (which is raising the question "Why does Dan Burton want a defective e-mail server disk when he already has copies of everything he SAYS he wants from the disk drive he got two years ago?").

And the latest one, CensusGate!

Yupper: That Evil Clinton-Gore Administration (as Klayman and Barr love to call it) is just prying into all our lives, and the Noble GOP is going to stop them!

Er... not quite.

As this link shows, the Republican-led Congress signed off on the Census 2000 questions over two years ago.

What's more, the same Republicans whining about the Census' nosiness were ALSO the ones who wanted, as recently as six months ago, to make the Census even nosier!

Get a load of this passage from the CNN link above:

Most members of Congress complaining about the census had a chance to offer suggestions when the form was being drafted two years ago.
Congress received a detailed list of the questions from the Census Bureau and had a chance to weigh in, said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-New York, ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee's census panel.
Maloney said that six months ago, Lott, R-Mississippi, and Sen. Jesse Helms, R-North Carolina, sought to require all recipients of the short form to state their marital status.
"You really cannot have it both ways, Senator Lott," Maloney said. "You can't say you want to add questions and then complain that there are too many questions."

And in any event, if the GOP really cared about an accurate census, they would have allowed statistical sampling.

But the GOP prefers that the people in traditionally Democratic areas, such as the inner cities, remain undercounted. Helps preserve that five-seat Republican edge in the House.

What a bunch of maroons.

It will be a pleasure to see them go in November.