John seems to be burned out from all craziness, so I’m going to continue with my rant against those who say that if Democrats were Republicans they would have rammed their health care bill through, the same way that legendary Senate leader Bill Frist rammed immigration reform, Social Security privatization, and drilling in ANWR through.
The reason I don’t like the myth of the omnipotent Republican majority is that it reminds me an awful lot of the myth of super-terrorist. Let’s face it: these unstoppable Republican political leaders of yore are cut from the same cloth as the America-hating geniuses who will bust out of that prison in Illinois and roam the country detonating suitcase nukes. And that cloth is paranoia about “the enemy”.
Did Bush ram his war resolution through the Senate? Sure, but our whole system is set up to make war seem appealing. We have “news” networks that get better ratings during wars, foreign policy think tanks that are funded by defense contractors, just war “philosophies” that (I recently learned) even liberal bloggers are not allowed to mock. And tax cuts have a similar array of wealthy interests, hacks for hire, and pseudointellectual whack-a-doodle behind them.
Health care reform has a similar array of forces opposing it. Even the great Bill Frist would have trouble getting something reasonable through, trust me.
None of this is to say that the health care bill we get won’t suck or that a better a health care bill wouldn’t be smart politics. In fairness to the Hamsheristas, they were right about Joe Lieberman, right about how things would go down in the Senate, right that a bill with a public option would be better, both politically and in terms of reforming the system.
But all this DEMS ARE TEH SHITTIEST PARTY EVAH stuff is crap. And to the extent that Democrats are a shitty party, it’s because they share Republicans’ fealty to corporate interests, not because they lack Republicans’ super-human ability to pass legislation.
We have always been at war with the RepublicansPost + Comments (187)