"I've never understood the left’s disenchantment with Obama. He runs a country that’s 22 percent liberal and he pushes through more gigantic pieces of progressive legislation than we've seen in decades and liberals go around moping that he’s not tough enough, or he’s too moderate, or he doesn't hug people enough."What a bunch of malcontents. If liberals wanted Obama to do more, maybe they should have spent the past few decades making more liberals, instead of driving people away."
-- David Brooks, July 3, 2012
Mr. Brooks does not make it clear which "gigantic pieces of progressive legislation" he is referring to, but based on his very next sentence -- "I also agree that health care was at least as audacious as a motorcycle jump across the Grand Canyon, and like that jump it will crash into the wall on the far side." -- I assume the Affordable Care Act is prominent among them.
Of course, as everyone who has not spent the last 3.5 years, hiding under a Gadsden flag with their Reality Deflectors set to maximum knows, the ACA is absolutely NOT a piece of progressive legislation: the Progressive solution to America's miserable, heartless, patchwork, for-profit non-method of health care provision would look a lot like a universal, single-payer, "Medicare for All" system.
The ACA, on the other hand, while it has many improvements over our current, miserable, heartless, patchwork, for-profit non-system and while it has finally established the principle of universal health coverage for all Americans as the default setting in all future health care debates, is nonetheless a huge, wet-kiss to Big Pharma and the insurance industry. Which really no surprise considering that the ACA was incubated at the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, and for years enjoyed the official Republican seal of approval...
...right up until the Kenyan Usurper put his uppity black hands all over this flower of Conservative free-market Brahmanhood, thus rendering it instantly impure and unfit for polite society and causing its former champions to immediately pivot 180 degrees and flee to their panic rooms while gibbering wildly about Socialism and Treason.
Which is why Mr. Brooks' current spate of commentary turning his nose up at the Big Gummint-iness of the ACA and his obsession with championing nonexistent Republican "alternatives" is so depressingly and predictably hilarious: the ACA is the Republican alternative. This is a simple and indisputable fact: a fact which, like so many simple, indisputable facts that have gone before it, Mr. Brooks suffocates and buries under a mound of Both Siderist blather because its existence threatens his very profitable Centrist dodge.
What may come as a shock to some readers is that I agree with Mr. Brooks on one, important point -- too many Liberals have indeed misspent the past few decades. Not that we have been driving people away, of course: the demonization of "Liberal" has largely been due to the tireless efforts of entities like Hate Radio, Fox News and Newt Gingrich's GOPAC.
No the mistake Liberals made was misspending the past few decades foolishly suing for peace with people who have been telling us very clearly that they hate us and want us driven to extinction.
We misspent too much of the past few decades apologizing for believing what we believe
instead of focusing our considerable, collective abilities on stomping the living shit out of creatures like Newt Gingrich and David Brooks.
That is a lot of ground to make up.
Fortunately we depraved, Murrica-hating Commie traitors are clever monkeys and capable of learning from our mistakes.
Of course, as everyone who has not spent the last 3.5 years, hiding under a Gadsden flag with their Reality Deflectors set to maximum knows, the ACA is absolutely NOT a piece of progressive legislation: the Progressive solution to America's miserable, heartless, patchwork, for-profit non-method of health care provision would look a lot like a universal, single-payer, "Medicare for All" system.
The ACA, on the other hand, while it has many improvements over our current, miserable, heartless, patchwork, for-profit non-system and while it has finally established the principle of universal health coverage for all Americans as the default setting in all future health care debates, is nonetheless a huge, wet-kiss to Big Pharma and the insurance industry. Which really no surprise considering that the ACA was incubated at the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, and for years enjoyed the official Republican seal of approval...
...right up until the Kenyan Usurper put his uppity black hands all over this flower of Conservative free-market Brahmanhood, thus rendering it instantly impure and unfit for polite society and causing its former champions to immediately pivot 180 degrees and flee to their panic rooms while gibbering wildly about Socialism and Treason.
Which is why Mr. Brooks' current spate of commentary turning his nose up at the Big Gummint-iness of the ACA and his obsession with championing nonexistent Republican "alternatives" is so depressingly and predictably hilarious: the ACA is the Republican alternative. This is a simple and indisputable fact: a fact which, like so many simple, indisputable facts that have gone before it, Mr. Brooks suffocates and buries under a mound of Both Siderist blather because its existence threatens his very profitable Centrist dodge.
What may come as a shock to some readers is that I agree with Mr. Brooks on one, important point -- too many Liberals have indeed misspent the past few decades. Not that we have been driving people away, of course: the demonization of "Liberal" has largely been due to the tireless efforts of entities like Hate Radio, Fox News and Newt Gingrich's GOPAC.
No the mistake Liberals made was misspending the past few decades foolishly suing for peace with people who have been telling us very clearly that they hate us and want us driven to extinction.
We misspent too much of the past few decades apologizing for believing what we believe
instead of focusing our considerable, collective abilities on stomping the living shit out of creatures like Newt Gingrich and David Brooks.
That is a lot of ground to make up.
Fortunately we depraved, Murrica-hating Commie traitors are clever monkeys and capable of learning from our mistakes.
4 comments:
There ya go with those pesky facts again....
Let's hope for THAT anyway because it's all we've got at this point.
Thank whatever that many of us have been screaming bloody murder about what's really going on to a largely inert audience since the Clintons passed the welfare "reforms" in the 90's and failed on health care reform (which really gave "liberals" a bad name).
Fortunately we depraved, Murrica-hating Commie traitors are clever monkeys and capable of learning from our mistakes.
Brooks is the self-appointed caretaker of the Overton Window, which, to paraphrase the pirate Barbosa, is more of a set of guidelines, not rules. Which pretty much makes Brooks guilty of the situational ethics that conservatives accuse liberals of. See the Pot-Kettle-Black predictive theory as to how you can tell what conservatives are doing, based on what they accuse others of.
Brooks was lying about the ACA before its passage, doing some increasingly desperate contortions to try and stop it. His biggest lie was that it was what liberals wanted rather than a bad compromise and a Republican plan, and he's still at it...
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