"The dreaded Right can't dictate or stop anything.

[kpete]

"It's often forgotten or obscured, but the central political fact now is that the Democratic Party controls everything in Washington -- from the branches of government to favors doled out to lobbyists to the policies that Congress and the President enact. Wars that are fought and bills that are or are not passed and policies that are maintained are, by definition, Democratic actions. The dreaded Right can't dictate or stop anything. That's the burden of having massive majorities in all areas -- everything that happens is the result of what the Democratic Party does, and that's why the divisions and conflicts that truly matter are ones with the party itself. The "right v. left" and even "Democrat v. GOP" drama dominates most of our discourse, yet at this point it is a distracting and largely irrelevant food fight. It's the Democrats who have won the last two elections by large margins and wield all the power, and increasingly the defining conflict is between those whose overarching allegiance is to Obama and the Party as ends in themselves, and those who see those things as mere means to more important ends," - Glenn Greenwald, Salon.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/12/fringe/index.html

[obliviously]

1. The Republican politicians are afraid of their own shadows

and would not try seriously to stop anything. It is the citizens in the next election that should be feared! Laws can be rolled back just as well as instituted!

[Kablooie]

2. But they can still screech pretty loudly.

[zbdent]

4. It's pretty easy to screech loudly

when the "liberal media" gives them a bullhorn and TV coverage ...

[hfojvt]

3. there's an election just a little over a year away

so it's not like the left is all-powerful. It could be like the Kansas legislature. Democrats are way outnumbered, and thus, like the right 'can't dictate or stop anything'. Except that when it came to the budget it was a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans who passed the legislation. Not that that is happening, but it is, at least, theoretically possible.