Monday, January 25, 2010

Blame The Left

In Evan Bayh's world, THE ALL-POWERFUL LEFT always wins:
If you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up. ... It’s why moderates and independents even in a state as Democratic as Massachusetts just aren’t buying our message. They just don’t believe the answers we are currently proposing are solving their problems. That’s something that has to be corrected. ... The only we are able to govern successfully in this country is by liberals and progressives making common cause with independents and moderates. Whenever you have just the furthest left elements of the Dem party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country -- that’s not going to work too well.
Single Payer?
Public option?
Employer mandate?
Medicare buy-in?
Not paying for mandatory private insurance by taxing the middle class?

Yep, the same people who have gotten exactly none of their principles included in the health care bill are clearly the ones responsible for it's demise. Now this is nothing new for Evan Bayh, but I'd be much less annoyed if it wasn't becoming the conventional wisdom for our lazy political media. Digby:
In case you were wondering, the consensus on all the Sunday gasbag shows is that Obama is an abject failure because of his radical leftist ideology and that his only hope of even maintaining the presidency, much less winning a second term is to take a sharp turn to the right and enact the Republican agenda. Several commentators, including such luminaries as political cross dresser Matthew Dowd on ABC, insisted that the first thing the president has to do is pick a huge fight with the Democrats to show the country that he isn't one of them. Cokie said he should have asked John McCain from the beginning what he was allowed to do.

The historians and expert political observers on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show all agreed that Obama is no Reagan, a president who never governed ideologically and always worked across party lines. Oh, and he needs to be a president or a prime minister, but nobody could agree on exactly what that means except that he should try to be more like Scott Brown, the white Barack Obama, except without all the liberalism.

Oddly, the Republicans weren't mentioned, although Robert Caro did note that Obama inherited something of a mess. Peggy Noonan said he ran to win not to govern and they all agreed that was a brilliant observation. Zakaria did point out that Obama had a higher approval rating at this stage than both Reagan and Clinton and that the two Bush's were higher at this point because of wars and they all stared for a moment and then went on about centrism and prime ministers again.
The idea that this health care bill was anything close to what "the left" or "liberals" wanted is so far from the truth and easily dis-proven it's stunning. But that would mean we live in a strange world where the broader-fication of the bill would have made it less popular, and we can't have that.

They can't acknowledge that because it would shatter the lazy cookie cutter world view that shapes the thinking among 90% or so of the beltway media. Most of them have already made up their mind on the slant they'll give these stories, so why let the facts get in the way? And no one is promoted high enough to challenge this thinking because it's so clubby and cliquish that LUKE FUCKING RUSSERT is under consideration to host "This Week", a thought so mind blowing that it would make David Gregory seem like a goddam savant in comparison.

The never ending stupidity contest between the corrupt idiots like Evan Bayh who rule us and simplistic idiots who cover them is so fucking depressing.

3 comments:

  1. Obama is already a center-right president, can't wait to see what will happen after he cuts a 90-degree turn to the right in the name of bipartisanship and centrism.

    and yeah, shame on the left for creating such a deeply socialist health care welfare check for insurance companies.

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  2. actually, wasn't taking massive quantities of money from the people at large through taxes and funneling it to an elite upper crust what the soviets were all about? Isn't that why people over here hate "socialism"?
    So yes, this is deeply socialist, in that sense. It's just that now the beneficiaries are the people who own the government, not the people who are physically in the government.

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  3. yeah i guess it is socialist in the sense that it isnt socialist. without getting into some weird no true scotsman thing, i'm pretty sure its safe to say that this legislation runs squarely against the tenets of any kind of socialist policy.

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