“There’s Something Happening Here”
Jan 19th, 2010 | 25 responses
“What it is ain’t exactly clear,” to continue the line from Buffalo Springfield’s classic sixties tune. Marc Pascal’s recent post here at TMV about the “self-made hell of narcissism, greed, short-sightedness, arrogant ignorance, and an utter lack of a common civility or responsibility for our shared future” in which we find ourselves — largely as a result of decades of Republican and conservative antipathy to the notion of a shared public interest — certainly struck a chord in me.
At the same time, we have Democrats and liberals now doing Republicans’ work for them because, in their minds, health care reform legislation that we’ve been fighting to pass literally since Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency isn’t good enough to pass until it’s got everything in it that progressive activists want.
I didn’t imagine I was the only one who feels this way. But it did make me sit up a little straighter when I saw Andrew Sullivan suggesting that it may be time to move “from depression to rage,” quoting a reader who feels similarly, and whose communication to Sullivan “resonated” with yet a third person — Richard at The Peking Duck — who in turn pointed to a tirade by John Cole on precisely the same subject.
Something’s in the air. I just hope it infects Democratic voters in time to get them to the polls in Massachusetts to pull the lever for Martha Coakley.
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25 Responses to ““There’s Something Happening Here””
You can't win against nihilists by being detached or fair. You can only defeat them by offering an equally evil but substantially different agenda.
When the theocrats unleashed a fatwa against Rushdie, they won automatically. When Cheney authorized war crimes, he won by default. When the christianists decided they had the right to treat gay couples differently, they were already victorious. Good only exists in contrast to evil. Evil seeks to destroy all the rules. We can only defeat evil by reminding ourselves that our infrastructure and fancy courthouses merely obscure the jungle and hasn't replaced it. We can only defeat evil by fighting, dying and killing like beasts, by offering a different kind of agenda that propels itself through evil as well. We can set up as many rules as we want – the first one to break them wins by default.
If the Dems are looking for someone to blame, they need only look in the mirror. They havehad the 60 to pass whatever they wanted, but lacked the courage to do it. They had the White House, but gave HCR leadership to Congress. They rarely gave the appearance that they were doing anything to help Americans get back to work. They didn't let CSPAN in to televise how Congress sold us out to the Health Care Industry. They aren't even trying to pass a public option. The list goes on and on.
It all started when they nominated a first term Senator with very little political experience and basically no Washington experience. He gave great speeches. He had a great marketing campaign. He had no idea what he was getting himself or his people into. Clinton would have done things better.
Hopefully Obama has learned a lot this first year. We can't afford another year of on the job training. He won't have his 60 anymore and that will hurt, but hopefully he has learned that he cannot trust Dems to do anything. He must lead. America voted for Obama, not Pelosi.
All you need to do is watch the first 10 minutes of the “Daily Show”. A great rant!!!
“killing and dying like beasts”
????????????????????????
Best exercise First Amendment rights peaceably lest you run afoul of the Second.
That was tooo funny!
hilarious! Good tip.
The left wants a bad policy to pass so that it will fail and they have socialize healthcare in the U.S. The question becomes if the plan is designed to fail, then why vote for it in the first place. Could it be that the left does not want the responsibility for health care but just wants to tell others what to do.
Until the left becomes confortable with being the ruling class and accepts responsibility for the outcomes of their policy decisions, the left will continue to fail.
Of course, the current state of politics makes complete sense when one realizes that it is run by people who call the middle class racist for trying to avoid minority heavy schools and neighborhoods while they do the same things themselves. Ms. Coakley could not even be bothered to have children. If she cannot afford the time and effort it takes to raise children in Mass., what is the middle class suppose to do?
This is an old story… sorry to say. The public grasp of politics and how modern government operates is about as solid as their grasp of proper nutrition, mathematics, or environmental issues. In addition their attention spans have atrophied by decades of watching TV and requiring constant stimulation in order to focus their interest. Because of this stunted development among our citizens they no longer have the smarts and concentration needed to comprehend has been happening to their government. Take minds already stunted by too little education in what used to be called the liberal arts, and give them a daily dose of demagoguing by ideological, emotionaly stunted idiots, and a goodly percentage of them will take up the message and start parroting it to other viable candidates. And so we are where we are. Still moving in the wrong direction. Sure the speed of that downward descent has been slowed, but the public wants instant gratification! Not getting it, so swing back to the other party. Ad nauseum.
Instant gratification isn't the problem, it's just exhausting to watch Politicians who e-mail you for financial support twice a month take a dive every time there is a fight.
Most Liberals would forgive the Politician loosing the fight if he walked away from the fight with a bloody nose, black eye and a couple of busted ribs, but that isn't what is happening. Every time there is a fight Obama & the Democrats end up taking a dive before the first punch is even thrown.
Kathy,
What continually astounds me about Democrats over the last several months is their collective inability to consider that they are responsible for their own policy failures. The fact of the matter, Kathy, is that the Democrats have the votes to pass the legislation no matter what the GoP does (which seems to suit some Democrats just fine). The main problem for the Democrats is reconciling the competing interests within their party – something that may not be possible in the end. If there was party consensus (much less national consensus), the health care bill would have passed long ago. Continuously blaming the GoP and “special interests” (as if the Democrats don't have any of those) and talk about “rage” against the “other” only proves (to me at least) that the Democratic party currently doesn't have any ability for introspection and critical self-examination, which, ironically, was exactly where the GoP was a few years ago.
So righteous rage is the answer if you want to follow the GoP to where it is today. If this bill fails, I expect your progressives and moderates will turn on each other which should make primary battles interesting for the next few years. You can purge the moderates in your party and create for yourself a nice leftist tea-party, though I hear that name is already taken, so you'll have to come up with something else.
Wow, things must be desperate if people are already starting to blame the American people for the failures of politicians and political parties.
What continually astounds me about Democrats over the last several months is their collective inability to consider that they are responsible for their own policy failures.
This has been the mindset since the Gingrich era, and possibly since Reagan, namely all bad things that happen are due to the GOP. The Democrats have more power now than they've had in decades, and probably more than they will have after November, yet all failures are the other party's fault.
Conservatives share the same phenomenon to a lesser extent, and it was very strong in the Clinton era. I think the Bush presidency did cause many conservatives to look more closely at the GOP as the cause of it's own troubles. This led many (including myself) to leave the GOP and become more moderate. It will be interesting to see if this happens with the Democrats, as their belief systems seem deeply ingrained.
ROTFLMAO.
Of course democrats had nothing to do with it eh Kathy?
Snort
Chortle
gasping for breath laughing
Kathy, will you ever learn? The Dems engineered their own self-destruction, even if some on the fringe actually say they didn't behave destructively enough. (!) Don't go looking for fictitious enemies to blame.
“possibly since Reagan”
Yes. There has been a lowly seething by the Left at Reagan and at the mainstream for rejecting liberalism ever since 1980.
And of course, along with getting everything else wrong, they blame others for their own failures.
The Dems had more power after the 2006 and 2008 elections than anyone could realistically have imagined. They were in a position after 2008 not only to be able to much of what they long had wanted, if they chose to be reasonable and pratical, but in fact to increase their popularity and yes, their power even more. Refrain from play-pen left-wing silliness, avoid extremism and excess, but instead do as we expected them to do, even as critics — proceed with a sensible, practical, effective stimulus effort, and channel success and approval from this in turn into real health care reform, ideally combined with reform of entitlements — finally rescuing Social Security and Medicare. They would have been set for years had they done the obvious. But they didn't do it. We expected some misdeeds from them, but in no way did we expect them to cast aside what the US public wanted, and move far to the left. Compounding their problem by rushing mindlessly to act, behaving without reason, adding ineptitude to a power grab in this and that area, is not what the public sought in 2008. The public increasingly has objected to what the Dems have been doing and it is this that caused the eventual breakdown with the health care “reform” (federal takeover) attempt. What we're seeing now in comments related to the Massachusetts race is not a surprise to anybody but the mentally impaired. The only questions or surprises concern the degree, not the fact, of protest.
In fairness to Kathy, the Cole and Peking Duck links are fairly introspective in looking at some of the things Democrats do to themselves. The Sullivan link is the usual anti-GOP hysteria.
SD, please do the favor of explaining your comment:
I fail to see how it could possibly be relevant.
“Until the left becomes confortable with being the ruling class and accepts responsibility for the outcomes of their policy decisions, the left will continue to fail.”
We all got our big introduction to their misbehavior this past year with their “stimulus.” It only has gotten worse since. They have tried to yank this nation too far left, too quickly (ineptly, irrationally). This repels the mainstream (even if the far-left fringe illogically is unhappy because it's insufficient!).
The best description on line to date is this:
“The real message of Massachusetts is that Democrats have committed the classic political mistake of ideological overreach. Mr. Obama won the White House in part on his personal style and cool confidence amid a recession and an unpopular war. Yet liberals in Congress interpreted their victory as a mandate to repeal more or less the entire post-1980 policy era and to fulfill, at last, their dream of turning the U.S. into a cradle-to-grave entitlement state.”
“Mr. Emanuel and his boss have [...] deferred to Congress's liberal barons on every major domestic policy.
These committee chairmen are all creatures of the Great Society and what was called the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. They have spent their lives in government and know almost nothing about the private sector or how to grow an economy. They view the Reagan era as an historical aberration, and they have stayed in Washington for decades precisely in wait of this moment to realize 40-years of pent-up policy ambition. They believe this is their 1965, or 1933.”
“Had Democrats modified their agenda to nurture a fragile economy and financial system, they could now claim their policies worked and build on them later. “
“The lesson of Mr. Obama's lost first year is that an economic crisis is a terrible thing to exploit. As they have each time in the last 40 years that they have had total control of Washington, Democrats are proving again that America can't be successfully governed from the left. If that is the lesson Mr. Obama learns from Massachusetts, he might still salvage his Presidency.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487…
“Clinton would have done things better.”
I thought the same thing earlier this morning. Too many people (I also thought about this) view the federal government wrongly, and expect the President to be nearly a king or queen, and to “run” the Congress, but that's how it's viewed now. At any rate, Clinton would be a better inside-DC operator and would have done a better job “herding” (what I thought of) or “channeling” the Congre-Dems (aided by a more grown-up, adept Executive, don't forget, setting better goals as well as crafting better regulation and having better ideas in the first place) to proceed with a more rational, expected kind of agenda:
First, Clinton would oversee a more rational stimulus, much less pork and more big-sums-of-money for a few key objectives (Medicaid, unemployment insurance, then also infrastructure projects).
Second, Clinton would go then to health care reform. She'd possibly approach it less ambitiously than Obama, but would have the Dems cast all the other stupid stuff this year aside and go right to health care reform. (I don't believe she'd build on that by reforming entitlements. No Dem wants to do this.)
A better stimulus and rational, real health care reform (ideally real reform measures and nothing else, even if she did lay the groundwork for Medicaid expansion later, VA qualification for Iraq-Afghan vets, and so on, moving Medicaid toward incorporation into Medicare, extending Medicare to children) with her at the head of the Dem food chain would probably have been accomplished, or at least the stimulus and a clear first legislative portion of health care reform, would have been accomplished sometime this summer.
[...] “There’s Something Happening Here” (themoderatevoice.com) [...]
I know the view that the President should lead congress isn't what our founders had in mind, but Congress is so dysfunctional and the power of the veto is so strong, that the President has become the defacto leader of both branches.
“the President has become the defacto leader of both branches”
Yep. (It's OK when it's a Dem leading it, at least, though not a Republican.)
Certainly he has a leadership role within his party as well, at least within the politicians of his party in Washington. It's expected for him to act when they are dysfunctional; you're right. Ed Schultz was angry a long time ago, at Obama, for neglecting this some time ago. Obama had gone to Madison, Wisconsin, for an appearance when members of Congress were trying to get health care legislation passed, and Schultz was angry: “What the HELL are you doing in Madison? Get your ASS on that plane back to Washington, and round up the Democrats, and START KICKING ASS and get this legislation passed…”
(maybe he should run for office, just to be able to give memorable speeches in Congress)
I think Dick Cheney tried that approach already, Axel.
Democrats definitely have something to do with that. Democrats seem to be incapable of believing in their own ideas even when given a clear mandate by Americans to implement those ideas. Republicans don't form circular firing squads. Democrats are their own worst enemy much of the time. If Democrats were more like Republicans, the stimulus package would have been bigger and health care reform would be passed and signed by now, and it would have a public option. Republicans don't believe in government or in public policy, but they sure are better than Democrats are at getting their wish list checked off, and that's because they are better at speaking with a single voice, at never deviating from their message and never backing down, and at doing what has to be done to get what they want, whether Democrats like it or not. Democrats spent far too much time and energy agonizing over being “bipartisan” and trying to “work with” Republicans as well as conservative Democrats, when it was clear from the get-go that Republicans were not interested in passing health care reform, in any form. They *wanted* to defeat the president on his biggest policy item. That's just reality. If Democrats had accepted that reality, they would have used their majority to pass health care reform. Their majority — not a supermajority. They didn't have to do it that way. GWB would not have done it that way.
Democrats are feckless, inept, and naive. But I stand by what I said about Republicans not caring about the social fabric because it's true. Democrats and Republicans infuriate me in different ways. Democrats care about policy and the public good, but they engage in incredibly self-defeating behavior. Republicans do not engage in self-defeating behavior when they have the majority and are trying to pass tax cuts or war spending, et al., but they don't care about anything or anyone other than themselves and their rich friends. And they don't care about truth or fairness, either. Whatever it takes to kill the other guy (“kill” figuratively in this context). They don't have qualms. Democrats have too many qualms.
Temporary sanity?
Actually, the moderate democrats have trouble believing in the progressive pipe dream and the progressives have an inability to believe anything else. If you want to have a party that will be firmly behind the progeressive dream, go fr it, just don't expect to be in the majority after the mass defections. On the bright side you will have a more loyal 25% or so of the American public behind you.