"But" always wipes out whatever came before it.
Senator, you coulda been a hero. But you took the cowards way out.
Now ya got nuthin'...
Coulda been a hero, but instead, he's a big zero. Damn straight he's a coward.
Yeah. And the "Butts" that we elected to run this country have run it into the ground, wiping out EVERYTHING that came before, namely, a couple hundred years of Constitutional Republic.
The founders are spinning in their graves. The blood of generations of heroes was shed in vain, trampled underfoot by an invading army of illegal aliens, welcomed to overrun our country by an army of scoundrels in expensive clothing sitting in the "hallowed halls" of government.
Don't be fooled, they will be back to finish what they started. They are NOT about to give up on what they want.
There was great hue and cry over other governmental abominations in the not too distant past -- monstrosities like "Know Your Customer" and "Total Information Awareness."
In each case, they did a "strategic retreat" -- and we "declared victory" -- and then, a few months later, we woke up to find that those very same atrocities had been imposed on us -- quietly, by stealth, when no one was looking. Oh, sure, they gave them different names -- but the net result was the same.
Back in the '70s, I was a State HMO Commissioner. One of the agencies we regulated came up with a particularly egregious piece of proposed legislation.
We vetoed it.
A month or two later, they came back with it again.
We vetoed it again.
I think they tried that one or two more times, with the same result. Then, it seemed that they gave up.
Several months later, during a Commission meeting, one of them casually mentioned something about the regulation, and, "back when you approved it."
We said huh? No, we didn't approve it, we VETOED it, several times!
They said, oh, yeah, you did veto it a few times, but then you APPROVED it!
We were getting annoyed, and we insisted that no, we did NOT approve it!
The bureaucrat said, oh, yes, really, you DID approve it, look, see? Right here... as he pointed out a clause BURIED deep within a loooooong "boring" section that pertained to things like (I am not making this up) regulations regarding the length of the gooseneck faucet in the janitor's closet in an HMO facility, the width of the hallways, and so forth.
Lo and behold, when we were going over those regs, rather than wade bit by bit through some fifty odd pages of that nonsense, we gave blanket approval to the entire section.
And THAT was how the bastards managed to get us to "approve" something that we were dead-set on VETOING!
It's how sausage is made...
2 Frist v (Oh, geez, I don't know, whenever he got into office) 1 a: To give up without a fight b: to roll over c: to screw over one's constituents and country (as an elected official)
Fristian \fris-te-un\ adj (since high school, I guess) : posessing qualities of a chicken, coward, failed leader, pusillanimous pipsqueak, weenie, cacazote (Ital.)