Destroying Obama as Quickly as Possible, Part 2b: Congressional Democrats Are Cowards:
God, it must suck to be a Democrat in Congress right now. Elected as a triumphant mega-super-duper majority in 2008, now you have been coerced into rethinking the very positions that got you that majority by an unsilent minority of easily-duped yahoos, driven to madness by a steady diet of shitty food, unemployment, and hard right media figures. It's like the end result of a long-term contingency plan by Karl Rove: if everything else goes to shit, send forth our zombie armies. Set upon in this way, you go into retreat mode, putting aside truly revolutionary goals for merely mildly reasonable ones. And you more or less hand power to the most frightened, the Democrats who actually believe the Republicans will act as honest partners in any compromise action. Yet, dear sucking Democrat, what you are merely doing is enabling the destruction of the Obama presidency because of a misguided notion that the nation is comprised of the mewling children who pollute our airwaves and whose minions have the time to go to your townhall meetings.

One of Barack Obama's greatest unspoken goals has the potential to be his undoing. While he is certainly working to get health care reform passed (and you can bet that Rahm Emanuel is threatening to gut the children of Democrats who don't go along), Obama wants to right one of the great wrongs of the Bush administration: he wants Congress to act like Congress. While the Republican Congress was, at best, the Bush administration's deformed conjoined twin, Obama consistently insists that the Congress has to work out the details of shit, that Congress has to decide if it wants to investigate shit.

Let's say he's sincere about it and not just putting up a front to support the "balance of powers." Let us say, and why not, that Barack Obama has given parameters for health care legislation of shit-what-he-won't-veto. Look at who he's dealing with: the governing equivalent of Hollywood chimps sent back to the jungle. J. Fred Muggs would be starving to death and repeatedly raped by hardcore monkeys within a day in the wilds of Tanzania.

Democrats are approaching the health care legislative process as if they are dealing with honorable people on the other side of the aisle. When will they learn? How many times do they have to touch that flame? Mad Michelle Malkin barked on This Week with George Stephanopoulos's Hair that conservatives need to act like a counterinsurgency within the supposedly plummeting-into-communism nation. Well, the Democrats need to act like the fucking military and destroy the insurgents.

You wanna know why Democratic poll numbers are sinking on health care? Because there's no central rallying idea, no simple notion people can get behind. It's all little pieces that, taken together as "reform," would do some good. Fuck, to even get rid of the pre-existing conditions clause would be a major damn victory, so low are our sights. But "reform" is vague. The majority of the nation, in poll after poll, wants single-payer insurance or, at least, a government plan to compete with health insurance companies. Instead, what we're getting is the bullshit dance of Democrat Max Baucus actually thinking that Republicans like Charles Grassley are going to do anything but negotiate a watered-down bill that they'll reject anyways as too radical.

Go back to 1993. The failure of Democrats to rally around the even vaguely progressive proposals of the Clinton health care proposals was one of the reasons they suffered such huge losses in 1994. You have to do something, you have to step up, not just cower and hope no one notices that you didn't do anything, in order for people to continue to trust you. It's better to live up to your promises and for those promises to fail than to not try. At least then, we're all in it together.

Nancy Pelosi finally came up with a possible line of argument in the last few days by saying, "Fuck it," and calling insurance companies "immoral" and "villains." Now, sure, the response is gonna be the Republicans parading a bunch of people to say, "Me like my health insurance," but Pelosi, who said that people call her a villain all the time, may have hit upon a real message.

Americans hate evil corporate entities. It's the plot of so many movies, and we're just stupid that way. And, for so very long, before the vast majority of them sauntered over to that cash-giving teat, it was the way Democrats actually functioned, rather than as easily cowed tools of corporate lobbyists and right-wing fearmongering, clinging to an illusion of power that is actually their undoing.