Sadly, No!

It’s the 59th minute of the 11th hour. The only path to national health care reform is to pass the Senate bill. Unless Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership can herd three distinct groups of cats — the Blue Dogs, the Stupak coat-hanger crowd and the progressives — HCR is going down in flames, quite possibly for another generation.*

This is where we’re at. It sucks. It also blows, a seemingly self-canceling phenomena that is only witnessed in the rarest, most ass-tasting conditions. And we are witnessing such conditions this very day — a perfect storm of sucking and blowing.

That said, if passing the Senate bill verbatim is a once-in-a-lifetime Suckicane meeting a Category 5 Blowphoon head-on, then NOT PASSING ANYTHING AT ALL takes us into the Bruckheimer-Emmerich territory of summer blockbuster-class suckstinction-level blowvents.

Again, not passing anything at all is a defeat of epic proportions. This cannot be stressed enough. Ask yourself if, in nine months time, when GOP Congressional gains have eliminated the possibility of rebooting HCR for years, you will be happy that at least the Senate bill didn’t pass. Ask yourself the same question, only now it’s 10 or 15 years in the future, and you are toiling away at another long-haul, uphill process towards reform, faced with the same entrenched opposition and the next generation of teabagging nitwits at every turn. Ask yourself how smart you will feel when you turn to your now-grown kid and tell him or her that back in 2009 you helped take HCR through the muck and slime of a year of hell to within inches of the finish line, and got bupkis as a result.

All the reasons liberals are very, very angry about this are absolutely valid. We’ve played the battered wives to the vainglorious douchebags in the Senate Club For Ass time and again throughout this whole nasty process, making concession after concession to the likes of Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu. It’s very, very tempting to finally say, enough is enough, you cannot pass.

This is not a minor thing, to further enable these patrician asswipes. Nor is it a minor thing to essentially validate the ascendancy of the Senate — an archaic, obstructionist, anti-Democratic relic of a bygone time — in the hierarchy of institutional power. Nor is it a minor thing at-fucking-all to have to accept that HCR has no public option, is full of blatant bribes, screws unions and shovels piles of cash into the insurance companies, among other things.

Sadly, we just have no other options.** There is a ray of hope that the House may be able to wheedle out some assurances from the Senate that post-passage bill-fixing will be done in reconciliation. That’s increasingly less likely to happen, however. I would argue that even without such assurances, Congress could still fix some of the most objectionable parts of the Senate bill post-passage. And in ways that could actually present Dems with some minor but meaningful victories — for example, a straight vote on eliminating the Ben Nelson bribe seems like it would pass easily and even with the bipartisan support that the Villagers so frantically demand.

At any rate, my wish — a wish that I wish I didn’t have to wish — is that everybody please hold your noses one more time and urge your Reps to pass the Senate bill. Balloon Juice has great guidance for how to do this, check it out and check out the roll call they are also putting together.

And please stop the blame game. There’s plenty of time for that later. We’re racing across the savanna with a ravenous lion at our backs towards a lonely, rickety tree that just might save our lives. There’s no time to stop and bicker about who it was that suggested the goddamn African vacation in the first place.***

*If Pelosi can pull this off, it would be the singular achievement of her career. She would immediately vault to the short list of greatest legislators in US history. The extent to which this would enrage the wingnuts is reason alone to urge the House to pass the Senate bill.

Is there a bigger douche than Bill O’Reilly? Watch how he handles this interview with frantic parents of a missing child in Haiti:

This should be an object lesson in how not to talk to people in the midst of a personal crisis.

Folks, Scott Brown’s victory has sent a clear message that not one single American voter supports a progressive agenda. Let’s face it — it’s over. The Dems are not going to be able to salvage a single thing out of this.

As if they ever were.

We might as well quit trying. Look, Roy thinks he’s joking with this headline over at the Village Voice:

Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate

LOL etc., but guess what. It’s not a joke. It’s true. The Republicans own us. We may still technically have the presidency, large majorities in both houses of Congress and more governors, but really, the endgame in this particular political drama is all but written in stone.

And the message for any sane person is: Give up. Stop thinking it will ever get better. It will only get worse forever and ever and ever.

Let’s use a sports analogy. Those totally suck, but things are so hopeless that it’s pointless to try to create some wittier, more insightful way of analyzing the situation.

Anyway, imagine you are a football team that is up by three touchdowns in the fourth quarter. That’s the Dems in January of last year. Now imagine that the opposing team cuts your lead to let’s say 10 points* with about four minutes to play and they have the ball. That’s us right now.

As any fan of football knows, this is the point in the game where you pull your starters and just give up, because the team with the ball is going to score anyway and why bother even trying? And after they score again to cut your lead to just three, they’ll just get the ball back and score a field goal and then it’ll be overtime and you’re just going to lose the coin toss for possession and then you’ll lose the game. And your first-round draft pick next year is going to be the one who breaks his leg or gets busted for drugs, so that’s not worth looking forward to either.

So it’s useless to try to do anything about it. And the same is true of life and definitely of politics. Some people are saying we should call our representatives and keep the pressure on for health care reform or whatever, but that’s just stupid.

If anything, we should be calling our representative to tell them that we’re probably not going to vote at all next time regardless of what they do, but if we vote it will probably be for them because they’ve got name recognition and in a few months we’re going to forget what this phone call was about anyway.

That would be both honest and polite and also true. Then again, why bother calling them at all? It’s not going to have any effect on what happens either way. If anything, it’ll probably make things worse.

*In this example, the other team scored three field goals and a safety.

Brad adds: I actually laughed my ass off when I read this email to Marshall today:

The worst is that I can’t help but feel like the main emotion people in the caucus are feeling is relief at this turn of events. Now they have a ready excuse for not getting anything done.

My sports analogy: “OK, Team Blue, our first-down play didn’t go anywhere and I have no confidence in our ability to do anything on 2nd and 3rd, so… let’s punt! Go team!”

ABOVE (left to right): Jonah Goldberg, David Brooks

Shorter Jonah “The Whale” Goldberg, The New York “There’s A Porch Monkey In The White House” Post
Haiti’s True Curse

• The real problem in Haiti is that it’s populated by a bunch of lazy niggers, and if we just keep giving them money nothing will ever change.*

Shorter David Brooks, The New York Fucking Times, Fer Chrissake
The Underlying Tragedy

• The real problem in Haiti is that it’s populated by a bunch of lazy niggers, and if we just keep giving them money nothing will ever change.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

*Travis G. posted earlier a better shorter version of Jonah’s column.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online
Tough Love the Only Long-Term Cure for Haiti

• We should be careful not to help Haitians too much, or otherwise it’ll just encourage them to have more earthquakes.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Look, I think the “lesson” of yesterday’s election and voter discontent is pretty clear: Democrats badly underestimated how awful this recession was going to get and when they shifted their focus to health care reform they blithely assumed that the steps they had already taken, from the stimulus to HAMP to Geithner’s brilliant-still-to-be-revealed secret plan for fixing the banks, would start bringing unemployment down and would make for a more favorable political climate this year.

The Washington Post, as usual, gets this simple lesson completely wrong:

Voters, not just in Massachusetts and certainly not just in the Republican Party, are worried about government spending. Budget deficits and the national debt alarm many Americans, and rightly so. Voters also are disappointed that President Obama’s promises of pragmatic, bipartisan cooperation have not been fulfilled.

Sorry, but no. Without going into a Nate Silver-style poll projection, I think I can boil down voters’ concerns right now in the following order of importance:

• I’ve been unemployed for a year.

• My mortgage is underwater.

• My small business can’t get money because the banks aren’t lending at reasonable rates.

• The government is spending too much money.

• My senators don’t hold hands and sing the theme from “The Get-Along Gang” while drafting legislation.

It’s damn simple — the economy sucks and the measures that the administration have taken have provided very little effective, immediate relief to the average person. So when the health care debate went into a Baucus-induced wankfest over the summer, the Democrats lost a lot of time when they could have been working harder on job creation. If somebody is really suffering, the first thing they want is help. They’ll become concerned about how to pay for it only after they’ve been rescued.

More utter dumbness from the WaPo:

The White House answer will be: We tried, and Republicans didn’t want to play ball. That’s true, and the growing strength of the party’s Tea Party wing is making cooperation ever more difficult.

But imagine that Mr. Obama had refused to take the Republicans’ no as his final answer. The president acknowledged, for example, that malpractice litigation is a factor in driving up health-care costs. He signaled he might be open to its reform if Republican senators would support his overall framework. When none did, malpractice reform fell by the wayside, which was the predictable response; why offend a Democratic interest group (trial lawyers) for no apparent political gain? But Mr. Obama could have insisted: This is a good idea, not just a Republican idea, and it belongs in health-care reform. A series of such steps, difficult as they would be, might have a real effect on public opinion and the political climate.

Well let’s see. Obama and the Senate took the WaPo’s Sensible Advice about implementing a tax on “Cadillac” health plans that pissed off a lot of union people. Did needlessly pissing off the people who vote for them change public opinion on the bill or the process? Well no, no it didn’t. Next up: the Post recommends that Obama show he’s serious about paying for health care reform by implementing a poll tax!

We don’t believe that Tuesday’s defeat means Mr. Obama should back away from his goal of expanding access to health care while controlling health-care costs. But if losing his filibuster-proof majority in the Senate prompts him to stretch a bit further beyond party positions in search of practical solutions, both he and the nation might benefit.

We recognize and regret that Tuesday’s election isn’t likely to have any such tempering effect on Republicans. With their scare talk of a “government takeover” of health care, and their demagogic about-face on Medicare savings, they no doubt feel they’ve done well for themselves. But ultimately we don’t believe voters will reward a party that just says no, either; Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell won with a very different promise, of a pragmatic and cooperative conservatism. A little of that would go a long way in Washington.

OK, so the Post’s prescription is that Obama make meaningless gestures in futile attempts to win bipartisanship so at least the American people will understand that “he tried.” Meanwhile unemployment is at 10%, there’s a second foreclosure wave on its way and the banks are just as messed up as ever. Crackers, people don’t need meaningless feel-good bipartisan gestures, they need help!

Also, can I add that Jon Walker is 100% right about this:

Let me put this as simply as possible. Democrats control everything in Washington right now. They control the White House. They have a huge margins in the House and in the Senate. Democrats have larger margins in both chambers than any party has had for decades. They have zero excuses for failing to deliver. Americans will not find some nonsense about having only 59 Senate seats as an acceptable excuse for failing to accomplish anything. If Democrats think they can win in 2010 by running against Republican obstructionism, they will lose badly.

Not only will Democrats lose badly if they adopt this strategy, but they will be laughed at. Republicans never had 59 Senate seats, and that did not stop them from passing the legislation they wanted. Trying to explain to the American people how, despite controlling everything, Democrats cannot do anything, because a mean minority of 41 Republican senators won’t let them, is a message that will go over like a lead balloon. If you try to use that excuse, people will think elected Democrats are liars, wimps, idiots, or an ineffectual combination of all three.

If the Dems use having “only” 59 seats as a reason to not do anything to help with the jobless situation they deserve to lose.

UPDATE: Krugman:

Second, David Axelrod is right: the campaign against HCR has been based on lies, and the only way to refute those lies (and stop them from being rolled out again and again) is to pass the thing, and let people see it in action. It’s too bad startup is delayed under the Senate bill — but even so, that’s what you have to do.

Finally, Democrats have to realize that politics isn’t just about where you stand on issues, it’s about perceptions of a party’s character. The rap on Dems has always been that they’re wimps — and giving in on such a central part of the party’s agenda, emerging from two years in power with nothing major to show for it, will play right into that perception.

I’ve long said that the Dems will get shellacked in 2010. But they could at least go down fighting and enact some policies that will do some good. Or, conversely, they could just turtle themselves and realize after the inevitable reaming in November that they spent two years accomplishing close to nothing.

Christ, I think I’m starting to see why people ever voted for Republicans last decade. Sure, they were crazy, but at least they had some self-respect and confidence!

It’s been a while since we checked in with Bob Owens, aka the Confederate Yankee, or as I’ve decided to start calling him, the Dixie Doodle Dumbfuck (DDD):

Slowing Brown Down (If He Wins)

… while many have come to view a Brown victory as their last, best hope to derail socialized medicine, there is a sincere danger that Massachusetts Democrats, working in conjunction with a Pelosi House and Reid Senate, may attempt procedural tricks to thwart the will of voters and push through ObamaCare before Brown can be seated as a senator.

Couple things here. First, you’ll notice how DDD is about four-fifths of the way towards convincing himself that Scott Brown’s win somehow gives the GOP the majority of seats in the 100-member Senate despite the Dems and their Caucus partners* still holding 59 of them.

Second, a special election in one state out of 50 now represents the ‘will of the voters’ such that what are still Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress would be guilty of ‘thwarting’ said will should they dare to ‘push through’ health care reform that each house already passed before Scott Brown and his truck were known to anybody but a handful of politically minded Massholes.

As for seating Brown — well, it looks like Massachusetts Dems may well use the letter of the law to hold that up until he’s received a formal certificate of election. Tactically, I’d call that pretty stupid on the Dems’ part, and I’m pessimistic about what it would do strategically either, e.g. allow breathing room for a better HCR bill, when it seems fairly obvious at this point that the House is going to have to pass the Senate bill verbatim or we’re not getting health care reform.**

For the Dixie Doodle Dumbfuck, however, such small-potatoes procedural dicking about — the sort both parties do when they can get away with it — is borderline treason. So much so that should such chicanery come to pass, he seconds a call by some Puma dead-enders for ‘storming the Capitol’ to ‘rattle those Democratic senators and representatives who stand to risk losing their seats in 2010 if they so brazenly oppose the will of their constituents.’

Perhaps somewhere in America there are citizens who, come the mid-terms, will base their vote on all of this … alas, we shall have to wait for the exit polls.

Which isn’t to say that Owens is totally irredeemable or that his sense of irony has completely atrophied. Call it dumb instinct, but he did wait until the day after Martin Luther King Day to approve of ‘the most massive march on Washington ever seen’ to protest the possible seating of a US Senator a couple of weeks later than his supporters would like.

On the one hand, Jim Crow, on the other, Scott Brown … it really is a toss-up, don’t you think?

*Such as they are, I know, I know.

I don’t blame voters for opposing health care reform. There were a lot of slimy deals with lobbyists and with Ben Nelson that went into it and people were turned off horrifically by the process. There was also the fact that the Dems didn’t really define what was in the goddamn thing until very late in the process. Hell, I don’t even blame voters for thinking that all national health care systems are disasters, since we have a press corps that pretty much refuses to tell us what actually goes on in other countries.

What bothers me, though, is a conservative elite that doesn’t only seek to misinform people but is also incredibly incurious about the world around it. Look at Megan McArdle’s latest jewel as evidence:

When I realized that health care was probably going to pass, I was, as you can imagine, sort of unhappy. I thought that this was, over the long run, very likely to result in the untimely deaths of lots of people, maybe including me. I may have been in error about this belief–but it was sincerely held.

Holy crap. Megan, look at this goddamn graph:

You see the biiiiiiiiig red line that’s way taller than the other red lines? Yeah, you’ll notice that’s our level of health care spending per capita. And you’ll also notice that despite the fact that we spend an assload more than any country in the world, we have below-average life expectancies compared to other developed nations. I mean, goddammit, how bad do you think national health care in other countries can be? Could it be at all any less efficient than the system we’ve got right now?

Second — Jesus, I can’t believe I have to say this — but even though you “may have been in error” in your belief that national health care was going to kill you, you comfort us with the knowledge that it was “sincerely held?” What kind of stupid-ass bullshit is that. Megan, you are allegedly being paid, yes, paid to analyze policy for a formerly prestigious opinion journal. And you don’t think — my God, I’m not making this up, am I? — you really, really don’t think that you owe it to yourself and your readers to maybe think about things a wee bit before you decide to write that universal healthcare would lead to your untimely death? Especially since you acknowledge that you “may have been in error” (!!!?????!!!!???! >:-( ???!?!!!?!11!1/1? ) about this somewhat crucial fact?

But wait! It’s about to get vastly more illogical!

Had I gone off into a despairing and rage-filled rant about how I just could not understand how all those people could be so determined to kill millions and millions of innocent people with their stupid central planning schemes that never work, haven’t they seen what happened to the Soviet Union, ferchrissakes . . . should my views get a respectful hearing? I think not.

I… sigh… I… man, you’re making this very hard on me.

Megan, if you do in fact have a sincere belief that government goons are creating a health care system that will lead to deaths for countless numbers of people, of course you would have had a respectful hearing! You’d have been angrily condemning mass murder! But! — and here’s the rub, as it were — you acknowledge that your belief in mass death vis-à-vis universal health care “may have been in error.”

In a situation like that, it is natural to despair that those who oppose you have made a tragic error. But if you want to rage, rage against the universe that provides us too little information, and too limited brains, to make perfect choices every time.

In some cases more than others.

If Coakley wins (or Brown does and the Democrats manage, against my expectation, to pass something anyway), I won’t be happy about it. But I don’t need to go inventing evils where none exist, for the sheer joy of venting my unhappiness on a person. Life is too short for me to spend any time manufacturing hatred for strangers.

Ah yes, the strangers you’re worried might be trying to kill you with universal health care. If you can’t hate them, who can you hate?

Well, folks this has been a fun ride. But when our supposed best and brightest people routinely write stuff that’s this damn illogical you have to give up hope for just about everything everywhere in every conceivable dimension. As for me, I’ll be downloading my brain into my new Singularity body and waiting for the space-age robo-babes to mack with me!

Josh Marshall thinks Obama should go all in for health care reform:

What the Democrats — and a lot of this is on the White House — have done is get so deep into the inside game of legislative maneuvering, this and that ‘gang’ of senators and a lot of other nonsense that they’ve let themselves out of sync with the public mood and the people’s needs.

The president needs to find way to say, we’ve heard you. We’ve gotten so focused on working the Washington channels to get this thing done that we’ve lost a sense of the public’s mood and urgency. Well, we’ve heard you. We’re going to stop playing around and get this thing done. And then we’re going to work on getting Americans back to work. We know the urgency of the moment and we know you expect results.

Here’s the rub — even if Obama does this and manages to convince the House to pass Liebercare and then fix it through reconciliation, is there any evidence that the Dems will try to do this? The key to successful health care reform is that people have to like the reform. That means it must have something for them in it. People will like a Medicare buy-in, for instance (because Medicare apparently isn’t government, y’know) and they would have liked cheap prescription drugs.

If Liebercare becomes law without significant changes, people will hate it and it will wreck the Democratic brand basically forever. So if you can be sure that Congress will fix it right’n’good during reconciliation, then I say go for it. Otherwise, well, we’ll let the health care situation get even worse and try again in another 15 years. Wheeeeeeeeee.

The Ol’ Perfesser teases us with a link-back to a post in which he ‘defend[s] President Obama over Haiti relief complaints.’ That sounds atypical for Reynolds, so let’s stroll on over to the Instapundit archives and see what’s what:

… As I mentioned before, disaster relief isn’t like ordering a pizza. It’s hard to get aid into a place where the infrastructure has been wrecked and ordinary social order broken down. I’m seeing some people start to go after Obama on this in an obvious echo of the Katrina-based criticism of Bush. I understand the appeal of payback, but I don’t see any evidence that Obama has blown it here; this stuff is just hard. Of course, the press won’t go after him the way they went after Bush, but that’s a given.

There’s actually not a lot to disagree with there, notwithstanding the coda in which Reynolds sniffs that the MSM is a bunch of biased meanies. But as so often happens with Ol’ Perfesser posts, the host’s banal statement about a particular topic is merely a dog whistle for his readers to send in their decidedly less diplomatic observations, which wingnuttery Reynolds can then publish as addendum while maintaining some distance from its sentiment. It really is the perfect gambit for an intellectually dishonest curmudgeon, and Reynolds is master of the form.

At any rate, in the first such update to the above post, ‘Reader Kevin Greene’ offers this thoughtful counsel to Haitian earthquake victims:

If you’re not prepared to go it on your own for at least a couple of weeks, with your own supplies of food and especially water and emergency medical supplies, then you probably deserve your fate. Those of us who survive will be all the better off in a significantly cleansed gene pool.

In short, when the coming Social Darwinastrophe hits, all the undesirables will be dying of thirst or buried under rubble, so we’ve got that going for us.

But not all Instapundit fans are quite so heartless, so in another update Reynolds is forced to allow that:

Some readers think Kevin Greene’s comments are a bit harsh [just ‘a bit’? – Ed.]. Well, yeah, but I think they were meant to get your attention.

The same could be said of cross burnings. But really — how great is it that even in the face of reader backlash, the Ol’ Perfesser cannot bring himself to simply condemn the ideas of a person who would use the phrase ‘significantly cleansed gene pool’? Is he afraid that Robert Stacy McCain would delink him if he ever did that?

Following the Kevin Greene updates, some more level-headed readers point out a number of potential disasters in the United States that could be equally or more devastating as the Haitian earthquake. But as dutifully regurgitated by Reynolds, ‘Reader Ben White’ responds that those America-haters are all wet:

You can look back at any number of disasters that have hit different parts of the US. Remember the disastrous Mississippi River flooding? No widespread deaths. No panicking. No anarchy. Remember the hurricane after Katrina that hit Texas? You probably don’t, because there was no widespread media-hyped chaos. It was hurricane Rita.

You can probably guess where this is going. It’s interesting to note, though, that Reader Ben White seems to think that labeling coverage of Katrina’s aftermath as ‘widespread media-hyped chaos’ is somehow a point in his favor.

The difference is the people. Midwesterners won’t have the problems that New Orleans residents have. Living in a neighborhood with smart, capable people of good character is, by itself, an effective disaster preparedness measure. New Madrid is a threat, but it threatens us where we are the most resilient.

Katrina victims’ two big mistakes were not having enough bottled water on hand and opting not to be be born into an upper middle class family in Ames, Iowa. Not necessarily in that order.

Your readers should try to remember what country they live in. America may be in decline, but every town is not Detroit (or New Orleans, or Washington DC) yet.

Also, Harlem and Chocolate City, USA. East St. Louis is a special case, because it’s technically Midwestern and therefore falling concrete should bounce harmlessly off its citizens’ heads. But let’s just say that when the Big Tsunaminadoquake hits, ‘darker’ things are in store for those people … LOL wink wink.