which doesn’t happen all that often anymore; but he’s really sounding like he’s been mugged by reality when it comes to the whole health care debate:
Barack Obama campaigned offering a new era of sane government. And I believe he would do it if he had the chance. But he has been so sucked into the system that now he stands by while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks about passing health care via “deem and pass”—a tricky legislative device in which things get passed without members having the honor or the guts to stand up and vote for it. . . .
Yes, I know Republicans have used the deem and pass technique. It was terrible then. But those were smallish items. This is the largest piece of legislation in a generation and Pelosi wants to pass it without a vote. It’s unbelievable that people even talk about this with a straight face. Do they really think the American people are going to stand for this? Do they think it will really fool anybody if a Democratic House member goes back to his district and says, “I didn’t vote for the bill. I just voted for the amendments.” Do they think all of America is insane? . . .
Yes, my own view may be distorted by the fact that I’m disappointed in the health care bill. But at least I violently opposed the nuclear option when the Republicans tried it a few years ago. I don’t think it is mere partisanship that makes me believe that representatives should have the guts to actually vote for the legislation they want to become law.
Either this whole city has gone insane or I have or both. But I’m out here on the ledge and I’m not coming in the window. In my view this is no longer about health care. It’s just Democrats wanting to pass a bill, any bill, and shredding anything they have to in order to get it done. It’s about taking every sin the Republicans committed when they were busy being corrupted by power and matching it with interest.
That last sentence is the key, I think. The Republican Party doesn’t have clean hands on this, though they’ve yet to do anything that took quite as much gall as what the Democrats are doing here; the GOP abandoned its principles and supporters both for the siren song of the pleasures of power, and they quite rightly got kicked to the curb by the voting public for it. They deserved the losses they took, and if the political pendulum swing that looks like it’s coming in November in fact materializes, it will happen despite the fact that the GOP, quite frankly, still doesn’t deserve it.
That said, whatever the Republican Party might be guilty of, the Republican base still has the right to be heard from, and we are not happy with what the Democrats are doing; and who else ise going to represent us than Republican politicians? Joe Conason can ding Republicans all he wants for hypocrisy in their newfound concern for proper process, and I won’t defend them—but wrong is no less wrong because it’s pointed out by a hypocrite. Fundamentally, “you do it too” isn’t an argument (except for electing people like Sarah Palin who are outsiders to the Washington mindset). Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) can insist until he’s blue in the face that Americans don’t care about process, but he’s wrong; and quite frankly, to the extent that he’s right, we as Americans need to change that. Something I learned from math class and relearned from studying baseball is that good process is important, because doing things the right way is a better predictor of good future results than good current results; until we get the political process right in this country, we’re going to keep on fouling ourselves up.
I am not sure that any ordinary folks are heard anymore – either Republican, Independant, or Democrat. A bunch of folks have decided how we *should* feel, and they campaign on that until the folks do begin to feel that they can at least empathise with it, or are shamed into believing that they should agree wholeheartedly. Politicians and their stands are no longer shaped by the people they represent — it is instead the people who are shaped by the constant bombardment of what they should or should not believe, feel, and do. We might as well all be cult members, as many of us cannot point to a real, honest to goodness reason for why we feel like we do except for that it is a combination of everything that has been thrown at us.
Jesus never made much sense to folks because his stands varied from person to person and were related to the truth of the situation. We are unable to do that so we boil it all down into formulas, make it fit everyone and then defend our way to the death. It's the easy way. It's what politics is all about. God once told me that politics is what we resort to when we get tired of loving people. So no wonder it inevitably ends up corrupted!
Well said.