Professional Left Podcast Episode 959: The 16th Anniversary Show

"All cruelty springs from weakness." --  Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 958: MAGA Flip Flops On 'Forever Wars For Oil'

"War is a racket." --  Smedley D. Butler, retired United States Marine Corps major general and two-time Medal of Honor recipient

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 957: Happy New Year

"We twa hae paidl’d in the burn, 

Frae morning sun till dine; 

But seas between us braid hae roar’d 

Sin’ auld lang syne." --  Robert Burns

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The Ghost of ACA Sabotage Plots Past*

Since the latest battle in the Republican Party's 15 year long campaign to gut the ACA will reach its catastrophic conclusion in just a few days...and since we may well be going from one government shutdown to the next over that issue... and since a leitmotif of this little blog of mine has been the absolutely lethal effect which the Both Sides Do It lie has had on our media and our politics... in the spirit of the season, let's tie that all together in a big, Christmas bow and take a No Fair Remembering Stuff (™) journey back to the Before Time about which most dare not speak.

The date: September 25, 2013.  

The location: The United States Senate.

The issue: Passing the damn budget.

Tea Party crank, first-term Texas senator and possible Zodiac-killer, Ted Cruz, decided that heaving a boulder onto the budget-approval tracks by staging a filibuster to kill the Affordable Care Act by stopping the vote to pass the budget would conjure him some political capital.  So he began running his mouth on September 25th and didn't stop until the next day.  His all-night stunt included him quoting the Founding Fathers and the Bible and reading “Green Eggs and Ham.”  

There are videos of this on YouTube which I will spare you because I'm a nice guy.

Cruz's irritating stunt didn't delay the Senate vote on the ACA.  It didn't change any votes in the Senate, but it did manage to piss off a number of Senate Republicans.  However it also inspired Republican Tea Party lunatics in the House to just up and shut the whole government down to try to kill the Affordable Care Act.  

The Republican House kept the government shut down for 16 long days and then gave up.  

In the end the shutdown accomplished nothing but the temporary furlough of 800,000 federal workers, punching the economy in the gut and infuriating the general public.  This doomed idiocy was led by Heritage Action and the Fake Tea Party.  Republicans lost, Democrats won, and the government reopened with an agreement to vote on a clean funding bill that didn't screw with the ACA, on October 25 

Here is a portion of a speech that then-president Barack Obama gave during the shutdown, included here because it'll come up later.

Given all of this high drama, it should come as no surprise that on Sunday, October 20, 2013, the Sunday Shows were full of Gummint Shutdown Talk.  And, since I have extensive Sunday Morning Comin' Down archives --

-- I rooted around in there for a bit and my oh my, is this all going to sound familiar.  

This is me, from The Before Time of 2013.

This week, another drunk dial from the Valley of the Dead as the Both Sides Caucus fired up their fighters and screamed into the sky to strafe any attempt at truth and reconciliation to bits.

First, on "This Week...with The Clinton Guy Who Fell From Grace with the Sea" we begin with a panel of delusional teabaggers perfectly ordinary, indignant white Americans who express their love for Murrica and their completely rational concerns about how the Kenyan Usurper has personally stomped everything they ever loved to death by dutifully regurgitating every brain-dead, wingnut bumper-sticker you have ever heard of.

What was missing?

How about...an identical panel of non-crazy Liberals?

Anywhere?

Ever?

Patiently and lovingly deconstructing paranoid Conservative piffle?

For the one millionth time?

That you will never see on network teevee.

Instead, we pivot straight to Matthew Dowd (paid Conservative Shill who still has a job in front of a teevee camera for reasons that continue to defy understanding) and Adam Kinzinger (R, IL Whitelandia) tag-teaming the Kenyan Usurper for committing the single most horrific transgression against the serenity of the life forms who exist floating from party to party within the Washington D.C. terrarium: actually naming and blaming the people who were actually to blame for the most recent Republican clusterfuck:

DOWD I think that Martha, part of the real problem in this is until this part changes I think that we're going to be in this situation. We need to redefine winning differently. We define winning today as us versus them.

I'm going to score points and if I don't score points I'm going to decide who the winner and the loser is. We define everything as a battle, everything as a civil war. The president, I think, has tried to balance this tension, but I think he constantly falls into; I think he would like to bring the country together and be accommodating and do all that. He ran on that just like Bush ran on that.

The end result of Bush's didn't turn out well. The end results of President Obama's didn't turn out well. But I think President Obama lapses back into this sort of dualistic thing that, OK I wasn't able to do it, I'm going to point fingers and I'm going to, and you watched his speech last week. And his speech last week was a perfect microcosm--

Martha Raddatz, (warming the seat for The Clinton Guy Who Fell From Grace with the Sea): Let's change the tone, but maybe not. 

DOWD: Let's change the tone but they're at fault. Whenever you say they're at fault, you can't--

To her credit, Representative Donna Edwards, (D, MD) actually attempted to haul this umpteenth iteration of the same, sick, tired, trifling, poisonous, premeditated, highly profitable and genuinely evil Both Sider bullshit to the ground:

EDWARDS: Well Matt come on it is really important here. We don't want to do a rewrite of this. And in order not to do a rewrite, you actually have to understand who was, who was at fault. And there was real fault here. We had a majority of Republicans--

And for her trouble, she was promptly and frantically side-tackled (in a brutal, face-mask-grabbing, fact-snapping move called "Blitzering" in the lingua franca of Bullshit Mountain) by Ms. Raddatz:

RADDATZ: But that again is--

EDWARDS: And Democrats who wanted to keep the government opened.

RADDATZ: Peter let me switch a little bit here. I want you all to talk about Obamacare...

Translation: Please stop pointing out that more than half the guests on this show are paranoids, nihilists, rubes and liars!

Meanwhile, over at "Meet the Press" we find exactly the same song being sung in a different key.

First, to establish that one is not flat-out insane, one must make a token gesture in the direction of acknowledging that the Tea Party (for which you expressed such fondness back in 2010) might actually be a little tetched:

DAVID BROOKS:  I think the Republicans may decide to tire of doing face plants. And so I think the moderate Republicans, such as they exist, may have had a little manhood injection, willing to stand up to the Tea Party and actually be a much more bipartisan, or at least a more moderate, party, a more realistic party...

DAVID BROOKS: ...The question now is will the Republican Party have a civil war over the nature of the party? And I think we're beginning to see rumblings of that. The problem is, to have a civil war, you actually have to have two sides. The Tea Party has a side. They have a political movement. They have a think tank. They have a donor side. 

The other side, the Republicans who want to be able to compete in California, in New York, along the east coast and in Illinois, they don't have a side. They have American Crossroads, a PAC. They have a cocktail party. And so what they need to do is actually build some institutions, some think tanks, some fundraising efforts, some grassroots organizations, to match Tea Party, or else the Tea Party will take over.

driftglass aside/

Golly, I wonder whatever happened to those institutions and think tanks and passion and money?

Oh yeah!  I remember!   

In order to win elections, you handed all of that over to these people  

 

when you made Rush Limbaugh your "Majority Maker" 20 years ago.

/ end driftglass aside

Then, once they were done with all the icky work of grudgingly granting that Liberals have been right all along (without, of course, actually acknowledging the existence of Liberals or their rightness) 'bout a mile outta Both Sider Town...

...Andrea Mitchell says, "Pig Pen, this here's Rubber Duck...

...And I'm about to put the hammer down."

ANDREA MITCHELL:  Both sides are going to have to give.

'Cause we got a little ol' convoy

Rockin' through the night.

Yeah, we got a little ol' convoy,

Ain't she a beautiful sight?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. The question [President Barack Obama had] never answered in all these years is, "How do I build a governing majority in this circumstance?"

Come on and join our convoy

Ain't nothin' gonna get in our way.

DAVID GREGORY [rough translation]:  Fuck yeah!

We gonna roll this truckin' convoy

'Cross the U-S-A.

DAVID BROOKS:   He's got 40 House Republicans who are never going to be with him. How does he siphon them off and get the other Republicans on his side to get a majority coalition? You have to anger the left a little to build that bipartisan coalition. He's never figured out a way to do that.

Convoy!

E. J. Dionne was on-hand to provide some tired, token push-back -- 

--compared to the Democrats, oddly particularly in Tea Party. The president, a lot of times, though, when people say the president should lead, what they want him to do is adopt Republican positions and then push for those. That's not leadership, that's capitulation. I think we should stop talking about a grand bargain and try to have normal government in the next two months. Let's just get rid of some of this sequester, which is hurting the economy, and which a lot of Republicans don't like.

-- to which absolutely no one paid any heed.  Of course, if E.J. Dionne did want anyone to pay any attention to what he was saying, all he really needed to do was turn on Mr. Brooks fast-fast-fast, put a finger right in his face and precede his remarks with "Look fucko..."  But then he would be faced with the unhappy task of explaining to his wife and all the little Dionnes why daddy didn't have no job no more, so don't waste to much time waiting at that bus stop...

End of 2013 Sunday Show tour.  Before exiting the vehicle, please check around your seat for any personal effects (or affects, hahaha) you may have dropped during the journey.

And looking back at that 2013 shitshow, the thing is, Republicans were entirely to blame. 100%.  There was no dispute about that.  What these two men were bitching about was that Obama had violated the legacy media's Both Sides Do It commandment by saying what everyone knew out loud.  That Republicans were at fault.  Period.  

And remember, this was a year and a half after respected political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published their now-famous article in the Washington Post, "Let's just say it: The Republican Party is the problem".  And the two diametrically opposed reactions to the article tell the story of just how corrupt the legacy media had become.  Because while it got both Mann and Ornstein blackballed from the Sunday Shows, it also quickly became the most widely read, shared and forwarded opinion piece they had ever written, even briefly crashing the Post's comment section servers.

Also, remember that the Mann and Ornstein column came a full decade after the dawn of the Liberal blogosphere, which gave us the capacity to say -- in print and in public -- all the stuff we'd been saying among ourselves for decades, but the legacy media wouldn't touch with a barge pole.  Especially our assault on the Both Sides Do It Lie.

But in October of 2013 that patently ridiculous lie was still being staunchly defended across the board by America's media elite on the Sunday Shows.

And in December of 2025 it still is.

*Note:  We mentioned this incident briefly on our December 23rd episode of The Professional Left Podcast.  However, we got the timeline backwards: Cruz's filibuster preceded the shutdown, it didn't follow it.  Management regrets the error and, rest assured, although our entire research staff and all of our archivists have all fled into the hills in shame, those responsible will be hunted down and brutally reprimanded.  

Burn The Lifeboats

 

Professional Left Podcast Episode 956: 2025 In Review, Part 3 (of 3)

"All the pieces matter." --  Detective Lester Freamon, The Wire

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 955: 2025 In Review, Part 2

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." --  Aldous Huxley

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 954: 2025 In Review, Part 1

"“The past is never dead. It's not even past." --  William Faulkner

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 953: When The Music Stops

"Hatred is not the norm. Prejudice is not the norm. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy, scapegoating — none of those are the transcendent facet of the human personality. They’re diseases. They are the cancers of the soul." --  Dick Van Dyke's reading of a speech written for him by Rod Serling

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Open Letter From an Online Democrat

 

Sitting squarely at the intersection of privilege, condescension and cluelessness, we find the Bulwark's own Tim Miller and the Bulwark's own in-house pet Centrist-in-Liberal-clothing, Will Saletan, opining the following garbage in their podcast entitled "Calm Down—Democrats WON the Shutdown!"

I have added emphasis to guide your wandering eyes

MILLER:  Democrats online are big mad. Not me. But before we get to my contrarian take, Will, what what do you make of the deal?

SALETAN:  Damn. Well, Tim, I'm afraid we probably agree more than you'd like. Uh, okay. To me, the key word in what you just  said was online. Democrats online are really pissed off.  This is not an online thing. This is a real life thing. ... So I I don't think it's a terrible loss. I think Democrats are still standing up for what they fought for. Um and I think only if you are so online that you don't feel the pain that a lot of people are feeling over the shutdown would you think this is a total sellout. 

This drawing of a clear, bright distinction between "online" Democrats and "real" people is something the Bulwark is positively riddled with.  And undoubtedly its a big reason why they never engage with actual Liberals living out here in the real world.  

Furthermore, if you are familiar with my family's situation, you know that even though my wife and I are both "online Democrats" we're also about to see the price of insurance for her and our youngest child quadruple come January.   It's already more that our monthly mortgage, so quadrupling that is unsustainable.  

And the hear these privileged clowns giggling and hand-waving -- these same privileged clowns who routinely scold Democrat for appearing uppity and out-of-touch with Real Murricans because we use big words  -- well that was bloody infuriating.

I would expend a few hundred words reminding everyone why is was a terrible idea to cede the moral and political high ground after the GOP nominated and elected Trump, because once our "liberal" media (and far too many of the liberal rank-and-file) started picking winners and losers, they decided that a tiny group of recently-former Republicans would become the official Voice of the Sensible Opposition.

This is what happens.  

However, since the Bulwark keeps its YouTube comment section open, I don't need to, because, bless 'em, actual commentors did all the heavy lifting.

Here is just a sample:

• "I am not an “online” person, I am a senior citizen , this not an “emotional thing”, this is not a laughing matter, this is our day to day life we are fighting for.  Please don’t dismiss us so lightly!"

• I’m online and I’m a real person impacted by this shutdown AND impacted by the insane lawless actions of this Administration. This is maddening. A shutdown shows the chaos of a Trump presidency more clearly.

• Love you Tim, but I hope you’re reading these comments. Millions of us (myself included) are losing healthcare because of this. The pain is very real for us “internet people”.

• the fact that “Raging Moderates” is more outraged than the bulwark by this is CRAZY!

• Its hard to giggle along with Tim when my local hospital in rural VA just announced theyre closing their OB/GYN dept. Now the closest L&D dept will be an hour away. There will be women and babies dying because of it. Listening to Tim laugh off our anger was just another slap in the face.

• I'm on SNAP and Medicaid. Your suggestion that only people online who weren't suffering were willing to hold out longer. It's wrong to think americans who are hungry or sick would instantly cave, like we're  weak We are as strong as any one.

• I feel sick. I can no longer bear this cynical cheerfulness between these two privileged men.

• I am a real person whether I'm online or not and this sucks and I'm really super pissed. We were winning and now we're losing. You're wrong.

• You're right, I'm online watching the Bulwark too much. No more.

• I've spoken to 5 democrats today IN PERSON who are pissed about this. This isn't just the 'online' people.

• The Bulwark just dropped several levels of respect for me.

• Calling people who want health insurance "The very online crowd" is not a good look, fellas.   We're not all members of the millionaire elite media class.  We don't get to pay our bills with MSNBC media appearance money - we've got these things called jobs, and they only go so far.

• My whole family is affected by the shut down. Guess what? I still say we chickened out. Don’t tell me about how I’m “just online.” I lived this shit. It’s the one time it would have been worth it.

• This is super alienating - how can you not get it? I might be “online” to you, but I promise I’ve lost my real job, im losing my real healthcare and may well lose my real life. It’s not hypothetical for me and I’m furious they caved.

• WTF, real person here and I’m gonna lose my Healthcare.   I can barely pay what they are asking now.  If my premiums go up, I am done.   My sister just passed away from cancer 

• Gosh, I guess I must be "online", which I suppose means to you two that I'm not a real person with real concerns. I live entirely on Social Security benefits and I have a spouse suffering from Alzheimer's. My 38-year-old son, who is autistic, cannot manage to keep a job because of his awkwardness.  We're all just hanging on by a thread, but we're not real people because we're "online". 

• Wow. To be so disconnected from one's own listeners and supporters.

• This is the most out of touch crap I've ever heard. 

• Fed family here. We were being crushed without my husband's paycheck. And I called every rep I have asking them to keep fighting. Temporary pain for me, but longterm pain for my neighbors who cant afford healthcare. This isnt a win, and Im tired of Tim's smugness toward his own audience.

• Good to know your guest doesn't think online opinion matter. I'm a professional who lives in VA just outside DC. I've had family in the federal government for decades. That comment was ignorant and offensive.

• This isn’t just the worst take you’ve had Tim, it’s the one that myself and others will leave over. My feelings are hurt a bit, and I feel some kind of way about your comments about ‘online’ outrage. 

• Will either of you lose your healthcare  come January? Will you lose the ability to afford medication that you will die without? There are people who won't live to see the end of January. Without ACA subsidies, I will die before the end of 2026. But yeah, I'm just an out of touch online weirdo. I'm delusional about my health conditions and my financial situation.

• Since you guys think the “Online” community is the lesser of the communities , if that’s the case then stop peddling the Bulwark!

• Boy I am glad you guys were never in a foxhole with me.

• I am on the internet, and I’m suffering. Please don’t talk down to us too.

• This "online" retiree will lose health care insurance on Jan 1.  I will lose the $737 subsidy and the cheapest plans will be over $1400 per month with a $10K deductible.  That is more than my mortgage and, in fact, more than my entire pension.  So keep your holier than thou "only online dems are mad" bullshit.

That about covers it.

I Am The Liberal Media

Ep 692 No Fair Remembering Stuff Podcast: Healthcare -- It's a Big Fucking Deal, Part 2

"The simple truth is that I am and always have been opposed to the Obama Administration's plans to nationalize health care. Period."   

-- Senator Chuck Grassley

Don't forget to visit our website -- http://www.proleftpod.com -- for all those sweet bells and whistles:  there are links to donate to our podcast work at that site, as well as links to our swingin' Zazzle merch store,  our respective blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Kittehs! and much more. Many thanks once again to @theologop for her invaluable support!

No Fair Remembering Stuff is a Professional Left podcast production and is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

Professional Left Podcast #76

“I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.”

-- H. L. Mencken

Related links:

1. As Physicians’ Jobs Change, So Do Their Politics.
2. Administration Opposes Challenges to Medicaid Cuts
3. “Why Medical School Should Be Free”
4. Rolling Stone on the Fox News Fear Factory

Thanks again to Frank Chow for the graphic at the ProLeft website and Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help. And don't forget, our archives are available for free with no downloads at Professional Left.

Help put a tiger in our Netroots Nation Tank here:

A Noted Academic Explains

The Chicken Lady of Nevada's Health Care Plan.

If It Was Voting Rights...

...I wonder what he would be saying right now?

The Piddler Asks

"Who Shot HCR?"

Whenever a David Brooks column commences way back in the worm-nibbled pages of some History 201 or Philosophy 310 textbook with something that sounds a lot like the lyrics of Stonehenge --

In ancient times...
Hundreds of years before the dawn of history
Lived a ancient race of people... the Druids

-- you can absolutely bet your lunch money that what Bobo is giving himself is a good, long running start at trying to make some sad, sad point about These Gut-Stabbed Modern Times while jumping cleeeeeean over the fact that his Movement and his Party have put this country into emergency room, bleeding from thirty years of Conservative bayonet thrusts into its belly.

So it was with Health Care, about which David Brooks wrote a whole column yesterday. Sort of. But to make the parsec-wide leap he was trying to make -- asserting that by contemplating the use of Reconciliation to pass a (deeply flawed) Health Care bill that that most Americans mostly want, those Bastard Democrats have napalmed the sodality of that otherwise still salvageably harmonious body known as the Unites States Senate -- he would have had to accelerate to Star Trek transwarp, gravity-well whipcrack speeds sufficient to fling him far enough back in time that he could have prevented Edith Keeler from letting Ayn Rand give Ronald Reagan his first Objectivist reacharound.

Or something.

Needless to say he didn’t quite clear that hurdle, as fine writers throughout the blogosphere have pointed out as they each took their turn whapping like a neocon piñata the insipid weirdness that Bobo actually ended up committing to paper.

Jonathan Chait at "The New Republic" believes Brooks may have finally managed to synthesize “the platonic ideal of a David Brooks column.”

David Brooks At His David Brooksiest

...
It is in some sense the template for nearly every David Brooks column, but it captured the major elements so perfectly that it almost feels as if every previous David Brooks column has been an homage to this one.
...

In reality, Brooks' conclusion is absurd. Does he really think that passing changes to the health care bill through reconciliation will materially effect how parties act in the future? He believes that the next Republican administration with more than 50 but fewer than 60 Senators would decline to pass a tax cut through reconciliation, but will now do so because the Democrats did it? I doubt even Karl Rove could say this with a straight face.

Jim Sleeper at TPM thinks it may have been yet another of Bobo’s signature mutagenic, conscience-balming lap-dances, performed for corporatist liberals who want to confine their actual involvement in hard gut-rehab work of fixing the wrecked America the GOP left behind to looking with alarm, tsk-tsking the pity of it all, and then sliding back into the Capitalist Hot Tub for another round of entitlements, narcissism and easy munny:

What David Brooks' Editors and Producers are Missing

By Jim Sleeper - March 16, 2010, 12:28PM

...
Nor would you really expect even most editors and producers in the not-for profit but still corporate and nervously liberal world to grasp the difference between Brooks' pirouetting and Mark Sheilds' elemental, bedrock honesty. I do wonder how Shields, on The News Hours, and E.J. Dionne, on "All Things Considered," can stand being opposite Brooks. But then, it's not up to them.

Again, the problem is not that Brooks is more "conservative" than they but that he's a chameleon: He poses as a cuddly conservative although he's a sophist whose sinuous dishonesty makes him uniquely culpable in a lot of American deaths, devastation, and degradation.

If there is bedrock below this poor man's posturing, it's neo-conservative bedrock of the hoariest, most embarrassing kind, but that is a story for another time...

It might be any of those things.

It might be all of them.

But to me, with its studied obsession with the secondary details of the Health Care crime scene (the angle of the paintings, the direction of the wind, the proximity of those dirty Democrats) and its equally obsessive avoidance of the obvious and critical facts of the case (the body on the floor, the Republican Party standing over said body, spattered with blood and with the obstructionist knife still in its hand) what it most strongly resembled was a murder mystery…written by the murder…after he had gotten good and drunk on deconstructionism.

What it most strongly resembled was "The Final Problem".

As it would have been written by

Professor James Moriarty.

And speaking for all the wee little bloggers who stand on top of our wee little pie wagons and inveigh in the great, long shadows of the Empire against the injustices of that Empire, believe me when I say that we comprehend the full weight of Moriarty's warning to Holmes --

You stand in the way not merely of an individual but of a mighty organization, the full extent of which, even you, with all your cleverness, have been unable to realize. You must stand clear, Mr. Holmes, or be trodden under foot.

-- perfectly well.

And Now, The Bigots Stand

In the doorways of their own hospital rooms...

Bleating...

Economic segregation now.

Economic segregation tomorrow.

Economic segregation forever.

Darrell Issa Implores Heaven

"Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!"

-- Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4

Yes, aggrieved beyond his ability to contain himself by the out-Heroding Herodic awfulness of the "Chicago-style politics" of a certain White House Chief of Staff, Representative Darrell Issa (R - Persecuted Whitey Falls, CA) donned his nighted colors, mounted his trusty hobbyhorse "Lamentation" and rode his own, personal Trail of Crocodile Tears all the way around D.C. and back again.

It was all vewy, vewy sad (From NBC News):

Chicago Politics Rankle GOP Heavies

The ranking member of the Committee on Oversight & Government Reform, Darrell Issa, is taking issue with the invective-spouting, political superstar from Chicago known as Rahm Emanuel.

Issa is upset over a series of reports that the White House Chief of Staff has been orchestrating an effort to intimidate members Congress and Governors who speak poorly about the stimulus program.

“I and others have dared to bring these facts to the attention of President Obama, the Congress and the American people,” Issa wrote. “You’ve unfortunately reacted by once again resorting to the playbook of the Chicago political machine.”

Issa’s language can be tied directly to a Politico story that said Emanuel “launched a coordinated effort to jam” critics of the plan. The “jamming” amounted to Emanuel asking Cabinet members to write letters lambasting the naysayers.
...

So as you can see, stripped of all its sackcloth, ashes and stigmata, Representative Issa's outrage boils down to the fact that the Chief of Staff has gotten some Administration officials to write mean letters like this to some of the Republicans who have been trying to kneecap the President's stimulus package.

Letter from Ray LaHood, Secretary of Transportation:

On Sunday, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl publicly questioned whether the stimulus is working and stated that he wants to cancel projects that aren’t presently underway. I believe the stimulus has been very effective in creating job opportunities throughout the country. However, if you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know [emphasis added].

This, according to Representative Issa...

(whose website links no less of an authority on temperate language and calm reflection than

Glenn


Fucking


Beck

to limn the Representative’s own fanboy love of moderation and probity)

...is apparently a textbook example of the horrors of "Chicago-style politics".

No, Representative Issa, writing stern letters would be a textbook example of Minneapolis-style politics.

Chicago-style politics, on the other hand, would be if Rahm Emanuel showed up in the House parking garage and proceeded to wallop you in the head with a snow shovel while screaming "Who you think you faaaahkin' with, Issa!" until you stopped twitching.

See the difference?

To be fair, Representative Issa might have had more to say on the subject that I just couldn’t hear over the bellowing of the wind-up Flying Patriot Monkeys his Party’s corporate sponsors have dispatched all over the country to drown out anything resembling reasonable debate over health care.

I really do hope we live to tell the tale…

And when you've taken down your guard
If I could change your mind, I'd really love to break your heart
I'd really love to…

Shout!
Shout!

Turn Your Head And Speak

A call for health care stories

This month the “Tome of the Unknown Writer” blog is dedicating itself to collecting your personal experience regarding the good, the bad and the ugly of the health care system. Blogger Bill Campbell doesn’t care if your story can be construed as pro or con, as long as it is honest.

Of course, as a congenital liar, I am excluded from contributing to Mr. Campbell’s efforts, but you honest souls, on the other hand, might wish to sound off.

If you do -- or if you have any questions about the effort -- head on over to the Tome of the Unknown Writer (click for link) or email Mr. Campbell at bootynovelbill-at-gmail.com with your tales

We now return to our regularly scheduled misanthropy.

Dear Mr. President

As every proud Liberal who voted for you damn well knows, if you're really, heart-attack-serious about real health care reform, among other problems you will have to deal with are the seven Blue Dog members of your own Party who are trying to sink your flagship program with a thousand tiny icebergs.

And as someone who very much wants to see you succeed, let me be clear that when I say "deal with" I mean "break a foot off in their ass".

Because while the Congress somehow managed to blast through the most radical subversion of American legal rights and democratic traditions in living memory -- the 342-page USA Patriot Act -- a scant 45 days after September 11, 2001 with virtually no review or debate because they were bulldozed into believing every, stinking paragraph of it was "urgent"...when it comes to a subject the nation has been ruminating over for more than 60 years --

Health reform under President Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) was inspired by former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Truman supported a national health insurance program and made his stance clear during his presidency; in 1945, he addressed the nation and recommended an establishment of universal health insurance program, federal funding to propel medical education and the construction of hospitals, as well as increased monetary aid for maternal and child health services.

Truman's adamant support for health care reform, established early in his presidential term, continued to be expressed throughout his time in office. In his 1947 State of the Union, Truman stated "[o]f all our national resources, none is of more basic value than the health of our people." In his 1948 address, he said "[t]he greatest gap in our social security structure is the lack of adequate provision for the Nation's health.".
...

for some reason the Blue Dogs in your own party need just a liiiiiittle more time to ponder it. Just a little more time to hem and haw. Just a little more time to stall it to death playing this game (From "The Lion in Winter"):

Henry: You know me well enough to know I can't be stopped.

Eleanor: I don't have to stop you. I have only to delay you. Every enemy you have has friends in Rome. We'll cost you time.

And as every single Liberal knows from years of bitter experience, the only way you are ever going to budge these fuckers off the dime is to stand on their political necks

until they pop.

Fortunately, I believe you've got a guy tailor-made

for the job.

So either cry "Rahm-bo!" and let slip the Dogs of War already, or quit asking the Liberals who spent their precious time and money getting you elected to take you seriously on any other issue again.