It's been a while since I did one of these.  I've been busy and I've lacked the time to do more than splash around in the commentosphere where I hold myself to a slightly less exacting standard of composition.  (Meaning I feel less compelled to proofread or break down the run-on's that are my natural form of expression into slightly more digestible pieces.)  And the longer I went without writing one, the more it seemed like that whatever I wrote about needed to be something that I thought was really important.   

This may not be that important thing.  But then again it may.   

It's just that I've been struck the right's total lack of game on Kagan.  Yes, she's brilliant and highly qualified and yada yada yada, but since when has that ever made any difference to them?  So was Sotomayor.  Yes, her appointment probably won't affect the ideological tilt of the Court because she's replacing a liberal.  Ditto Sotomayor.   

That's the thing.  From the standpoint of the Republican Outrage Machine, the only difference between the Kagan and Sotomayor nominations is that Sotomayor had more judicial experience and is Puerto Rican.  Both replacing men from the liberal wing, both brilliant, both conspicuously single and thus subject to offensive, intrusive, and almost certainly wrong speculation about their sexual orientation from both wingnuts and gay activists (and, P.S. and btw, that's a reader blog I intend to write soon).  Both introduced as people who are advocates of what the Rightwing Judicial Fearmongering Complex has labeled "Obama's Lawless Empathy Standard."  Both were well-known,  heavily foreshadowed appointments off of a very widely leaked short list.

And yet, despite all these similarities, Sotomayor was subjected to the full-on apocalyptic doomsday scenario treatment but, so far, with Kagan, it's like they got nothin.'  Several Republican senators have already said they'll probably vote for her and even the Teanuttiest nutters have all but publicly given up on doing anything more than just going through the motions of opposition.  They tried out a couple of smears--the "she said the konstitootshun as written by the founders wuzn't perfect" smear and the "gasp!  she praised Thurgood, for whom she worked" smear, but they were ill-considered and poorly executed and fell flat.  They tried to warm up the Lawless Empathy Standard outrage, but it fell flat too. 

They've got nothing.  And that's really, really surprising because there's a whole judicial alarmism and smear industry within the larger Rightwing Noise Machine, the Rightwing Judicial Fearmongering Complex, mentioned above, whose sole purpose for existence is to dig through the trash of everyone on the shortlist and, regardless of whether they find anything, deliver unto the GOP a playbook of libel, calumny and fear to start screaming about before the nomination is even official.   The GOP depends upon these judicial confirmation fights because there is big money in them.  Any Supreme Court nomination by a Democrat is like a spigot that they hammer into the purse of alarmed wingnuts across the nation.  That's the entire purpose of the RJFC--the network of "think tanks" and "foundations" and other front organizational unitaskers who show up on CNN whenever there's an opening on the Supreme Court. 

And so far, they've got nothing.  They're response has been half-heated and listless and almost pathetically ineffective, And I'm left to wonder why. 

One can formulate several hypotheses.

The first would be the progressive conspiracy theorist hypothesis that says they're laying low because she's really a right-winger like them so they are secretly for her.  And I say that makes no sense because, in GOP Crazyland, the one thing has nothing to do with the other.  The point of a judicial confirmation battle to the GOP is not to block the appointment, because they know they can't.  The point is to whip up the base into a lucrative hysterical frenzy.  Even if they're pleased with the nominee, it's the fact that a nomination has happened and the appointee is a Democrat is a not-to-be-missed fundraising hypothesis. 

The second hypothesis is that this blabbermouth blew the whole thing by baldly stating the cynical truth, thereby forcing the Republican Senators to walk away from the planned campaign.  Yeah, I know.  I'm laughing too.   Just like McConnell was too ashamed to repeat Luntz's "bailout" bunk once it was made public or just like Republicans were too ashamed to follow through on the cynical moneymaking plans that Rove would habitually telegraph at fundraisers before implementing them.  The GOP knows that they can just blab away all their plans with impunity because the Democrats never act on the free intelligence to take effective countermeasures in advance and the MSM never, ever, ever notes that the Republican politicians spewing previously prepared talking points are working to a plan.  

And that leads me to my third hypothesis.  One that gives me some shred of hope for November. 

Hypothesis three is that the listless response to Kagan's nomination is symptomatic of a larger collapse, a sign that they've shot their bolt, jumped the shark, run out of bullshit.  Pick a cliché.  They declared HCR to be the apocalypse that must be stopped at all costs, they lost, and the apocalypse didn't come.  They lost on health care.  They lost on financial reform.  The Tea Party has, predictably, degenerated into a band of cannibals, more interested in eating Republicans than fighting Democrats. 

Oh, and oh yeah, their idiot ideological dogma told them that deficit spending couldn't possibly do anything except deepen the recession, so they were banking on the economy continuing to worsen.  But now, here it is improving and there they are, looking increasingly ugly and foolish as they try to find a negative spin for every new bit of good economic news.  After a brutal, nearly fatal winter, people are eagerly, almost frantically, embracing the undeniable signs that spring has finally come, and the Republicans are still dourly warning of continued snow throughout the summer.  And they know they look like idiots doing it and, what with the losing in Congress and the Teanuts taking down Republican incumbents, they just don't have it in them anymore. 

I've been saying a Republican collapse of some kind is inevitable since 2008, that the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the party's  elites combined with the increasing dominance of the militantly ignorant fraction of the base practically foreordained it.  The question was whether it happened before the 2010 election or after, as a result of conflict between the institutional imperative of a Congressional majority to govern and the radical anti-governance ideology that got them a majority. 

We're still in a race as to when the collapse is complete, but I think their morale is breaking now, as we speak.  Just in advance of campaign season.  And it may just save the country from Speaker Bachmann and Majority Leader DeMint. 

Before you start in on me, this is not a STFU post.  No one's tryin' to oppress you or censor your speech.  Speech is still free (or at least was until the Supreme Court ruled it was a commodity last week--thanks, Ralph) and dissent is your sacred and inalienable right.  And, in any case, if that was my objective, I'd have to be the first to admit I've fallen spectacularly short of my goal. 

But just as you have the right to dissent, I have the right to critique your dissent. 

And my critique begins with the now largely repressed fact that the attacks on Obama from the left started, vociferously and loudly, before the man was even inauguarated.  There are some people who extended the benefit of the doubt and are now upset.  There are a lot more who've been attacking since last November, who've ascribed the worst possible motives to every tidbit of news and have knit those dire assumptions into their larger canon, even when they turned out to be unfounded. 

Well, folks, that's your right.  But loyalty is a two-way street, and back-covering is a mutual, not unilateral, activity.  And expecting the people in the White House to give love to the left when they've been attacking since before he was even on the job is just stupid. Seriously,can you not see that you've created the perception that there's nothing  Obama can do or say that you will find satisfactory, that you won't criticize him for?   

But worst of all is that we just attack by reflex now.  People hear a word that their dogma associates with "bad," it triggers a jerk of the knee and off they go, without pausing to learn any of the underlying facts or think through the magnitude of the issue.  It's fun.  It's easy.  All the cool kids are doing it so don't be left behind. And, hey, if there are any bad consequences from the attacks, it's Obama fault for not being sufficiently pure, so wtf not?  It's responsibility-free.   

This latest dreary snitstorm over the talk of deficit hawkery in the SOTU and support for a Budget Line Item Death Panel bill that was doomed to fail in the Senate is a perfect example of the rut we on the left have gotten ourselves into.

God fobid that they be allowed to apply even a little rhetorical balm to the miguided and uninformed fears of the vast majority of the swing voters who are getting ready to kick our asses in the fall without unleashing yet another rabid weasel swarm from the left.  They've used forbidden words, "adopted Republican frames," even (which, apparently is only "moving the Overton Window" if Jane Hamsher does it but perfidious beyond the ability of the mind of man to conceive if Obama does it.)  No, it's yet another sellout.  It must be.  Clearly, he's given in to the Rasputin-like power of Rubin and Summers who are both well known desciples of the economics of Herbert Hoover.  He'll probably reinstitute the gold standard.  It's just like Krugman was worrying about last month. 

But then, it turns out he's not planning on drastially slashing government spending like Hoover did or turning the future of Social Security over to a committee composed of Libtard and Teaparty extremists.  Instead, turns out it's lip service.  It's a gimmick that will have almost no budgetary or fiscal impact.  Twenty five billion a year staring in FY2011 out of three point six trillion in outlays, not applicable to the stimulus or to the jobs package or to unemployment benefits and mostly freezing the budges at levels that were significantly boosted during the preceding fiscal year.

Well that's precisely why Krugman, Reich, Greenwald and the rest of you ought to cut him some fucking slack on this rather than proclaiming it to be the greatest sellout to evil since Munich.  Or, even worse, switching directly to sneering at him for not actually being serious about pursuing the policies that they they decrying as the Abomination of the Apocolypse twelve hours earlier rather than admit they overreacted on the basis of assumptions that proved to be unfounded. 

I'm really not sure whether it was the pressure of the one minute news cycle created by the Internet that killed the concept of reserving judgment until facts are in hand or whether it was simply the the way that during the Bush years, things always turned out to be even worse than you'd feared so there was no point in waiting.  All I know is we need to get it back. 

This is a a rabbit turd of an issue.  It is a gesture of acknowledgment of the concerns (however uninformed) of tens of millions of voters whose minds have been shaped by decades of Republican framing.  People who've lived three decades during which the only economic theory they heard was debased neo-classicism (anyone remember Charlie Goodson's capital gains tax obession during the debates?) and distortion and denigration of the policies dicated by the Keynsesian school.  And, let's be honest, there was some factual basis for the disdain for Keynesian theory, as applied by our government, as well.  Few still alive really remember the way it got us out of the Depression, but millions remember the stagflation that resulted, at least in part, from politicians of both parties using the tools Keynes prescribed for dealing with emergencies long after the emergency was over.  Some of us were kids watching it eat away at the folks, while others were actually dealing with it, but it's a formative event in the psychology of everyone middle-aged or older. 

Right now, in the real political world, we've got tens of millions of people in that age group who are scrared and angry and too busy trying to stay above water to take a remedial course in Neo-Keynesian macroeconomic theory.  Tens of millions of voters who don't know dick about economics and tens of millions more who think they do but really only know some Reaganomics buzzword crankery.  Tens of millions who use the word "deficit" as a shorthand way of summing up all their fears and discontents, people who are dealing with the messes they got themselves into by projecting their own mistakes onto the government and misapplying a model appropriate to household finance to the government as a means of dealing with their anxiety. 

And all of them are preparing to cast their votes for the people who created the mess they're in, in no small part because all they hear from the right is "Obama and Democrats bad!" and all they hear from the left is "Obama and Democrats bad!"

A decent argument can be made that the right response to the politics of the moment presented by these people would be to use this as a teachable moment, try to get people to understand that massive deficit spending is critical to getting us out of the hole the Bushies dug us into.  But an equally decent argument exists that the right move is to give people who are scared some gesture of reassurance that the government hears their fears and is moving to respond to them, and save the economic lessons for a day when they don't feel like they're teetering on the brink of the abyss. 

And that's the problem.  The difference between those two arguments is a mere question of political judgment.  It's not a policy apocolypse calling for maximum drama queenage and over-the-top expressions of outrage from blog commenters, much less sneering and smirking from the blogs they comment on.    

Some people seem to think that this is the definitive shark-jumping moment for the Obama Administration and the Obamabots.  "Can't you finally see that we were right all along?  Is there no end to your fulsome apologies for his inexcusable betrayals of  . . ." well, whatever it is you say he's betrayed today. 

I however, think it is the moment when the criticism from the left jumped the shark.  The moment when we it became clear that the attacks are becoming an end unto themselves that have robbed too many of us of the capacity to distinguish between things that really matter and things that don't. 

I am a Democrat. Because I am a Democrat, I know  that I, and only I, am blessed with the infallible ability to identify problems and prescribe correct solutions.  Doing things any way other than the way I know they should be done will certainly and inevitably lead to catastrophe.  Any little instances in which my judgment has, in the past, proved deficient need not be acknowledged or considered as in any way casting doubt upon my own infallibility because I am an expert in these things. 

Knowing, as I do, both the problems and the solutions, it is thus clearly my moral duty to oppose, carp, complain, second-guess, and attack at every opportunity where deviance from my preferred course has occurred.  And fortuitously, my Democratic canon teaches that my dissent is rightous, is in all cases and at all times an unmixed blessing which must infallibly and invariably makes us stronger as a party.  It follows, therefore, that giving anyone the benefit of the doubt until we see how things turns out is a positive dereliction of my moral duty.  

None of the seemingly intractible electoral and political difficulties that Democrats and our president always seem to face after we win a presidential election have anything whatsoever to do with the fact that every Democrat at every point on the broad political spectrum encompassed by the party feels as I do.  Rather, those problems are due to the failure to do what I wanted, when I wanted and in the way that I wanted.  My creed tells me that attacks from the left were good for Carter and good for the party.  Attacks from the right were good for Clinton and good for the party.  Attacks from the left were good for Gore's campaign (he was such a corporate shill and complete sellout anyway).  Attacks from left or right (depending upon which side you're on) must be, can only be, Excellent News for Obama and for the party.  My creed tells me this, so it must be so.  Thus has it ever been and so shall it always be.   

I am a Democrat and this is my creed.  If you so much as attempt to suggest that there may be some flaw in my creed or that situations may exist in which my policy preferences might better be advanced in the long run by support, however skeptical or conditional, rather than dissent, you are a fascist attempting to suppress righous dissent and impose a monotonous conformity of opinion.   

Percent of Americans who think Obama shouldn't have bowed to the Empereror of Japan?  26%  (Fox News, 11/19/09)

Percentage of Americans who think Sarah Palin would have the ability to be an effective president?  26% (CBS 11/16/09)

Percentage of Americans who think a majority voted against Obama and ACORN stole the election?  26%  (PPP 11/19/09)

Percentage of Americans who do not believe Africa and America were ever part of the same continent 26% (DKos/Research 2000 7/30/09)

Percentage of likely voters who approved of the job George W. Bush was doing as president immediately before 2008 presidential election?  26% (NBC/WSJ 11/2)

Percentage of Americans who have a favorable view of Glenn Beck 24% (MSNBC 9/20) 

Okay, yeah, 24 is not 26, but it's within the margin of error. 

Well, the inevitable cloud of stupid conclusory generalizations by the MSM about What It All Means continues to expand.  Believing myself as qualified to make stupid conclusory generalizations as any cable asshat, I felt compelled to add a few before the cloud dissipates. 

1.  The new voters of 2008, the formerly disengaged new black voters and the young and youngish college types who turned out for the first time in their lives for Obama, somehow couldn't get excited enough about Corzine and Deeds to vote.  Possibly the abysmal failure of either campaign to try to engage them was a factor.  Getting them activated to turn out in 2010 is important.  Not gonna happen if Congress racks up an F or a D on health care and carbon.  Gonna take a B- on both at a minimum. 

2.  Luckily for us, Republican inability to learn the simple, obvious lesson of the last twelve years, "Club for Growth = Kiss of Death," is still intact.  Once again, they are poised to conclude that their defeated candidates lost because they weren't conservative enough to overcome ACORN's perfidious cheating. 

3.  Unluckily for us, Democrats in Congress are also poised to miss an important lesson: people are really pissed at Big Finance and are ready to punish anyone seen as connected to Wall Street or insufficiently tough on Wall Street. 

4.  Efficacy of OFA not exactly helped by all the former brains of the outfit taking government jobs in January. 

5.  Wolf Blitzer is still an imbecile.  And physical proximity to Wolf Blitzer still depresses the I.Q. of even the smartest people. 

6.  One party or the other his going to get hosed in 2010.  Which one depends entirely on whether and when the job market turns around.  No matter how much people say they're worried about the deficit, doing stuff that will make unemployment rise, like trying to cut the deficit right now, is political suicide for the party in power and a political bonanza for the party out of power.   

7.  In light of the foregoing, look for Ben Nelson, Lieberman, Bayh, Landrieu and the House Blue Dogs to start stridenly demanding huge budget cuts to control the deficit in 2010.  

8.  Christie is already screwed.  Either he governs, and incurs the wrath of the right, or he refuses to govern, and incurs the wrath of everyone else. 

9.  Imagine Virginians' surprise when it turns out Republican ideas for how to deal with the economy are really, really stupid.  

This isn't the reader blog I was planning on writing this weekend.

I had planned to use the Democracy Corps/Greenberg Quinlan Rosner focus group report that we're all nattering about this weekend as the jumping off point for another discussion of racism and its many subtle modern faces. I had planned to discuss the role modern racism plays in the hard right's opposition to Obama and to those of us who are, to some degree, supporting him--whether self-described as "liberals," annoyed and frustrated "progressives" or annoying and frustrating "moderates." Problem was, I had only read about the report. I hadn't read it. Now that I have, I have to agree that Carville and Greenberg are right: racism is, in fact, quite beside the point.

They're right for the wrong reasons. I disagree with their conclusion that race doesn't have anything to do with the overly-emotive and irrational nature of the hardcore opposition. It is absolutely clear from the quoted comments of many of the people interviewed (Georgians all, of course) that a thoroughly sublimated racial prejudice, combined with a repressed guilt about the racism, is contributing to the mounting, unbearable anxiety that's been driving these people around the bend for years now. If nothing else, it is clear from their inability to concede that any of their fellows are motivated by racism and their conspiratorial touchiness about the allegation.

That racism is what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to start a conversation about how different it is from the racism of my grandfathers, and, subtly different even from the 1960s-style southern racial "moderation" of my father. I planned to go into detail about how we need to understand that difference and talk about it differently, among ourselves and with them, if we're ever going to root it out. I still believe that the contemporary form of racism would be a great thing to blog about if not for the fact that it is, at this point, the least of our worries. Would that that kind of racism was the biggest problem these people presented to the nation.  (And yeah, that's what I'm going to keep calling them:"these people." If it be condescension, make the most of it) .

Let me state it plainly: these people represent a serious threat to the continuation of democracy itself in this country. Indeed, in my darker moments, and this would be one of them, I worry that this time period--the 90s and the first decade of this century--is where future historians will draw the line and say "this is when democracy finally failed in America."  And all, directly and indirectly, because of what the modern hard right has become over the last couple of decades.

The Democracy Corps report didn't tell us anything we didn't already know at some level. For a long time now, we've been saying that about a quarter of the people in this country are simply mad. In the later Bush years, we called them the "thirty-percenters" but the reality check presented by hard times has distilled them down to their seemingly irreducible solid core, representing about 25-26% of the electorate and perhaps a similar percentage of the population as a whole. At first, our observations were couched in terms of exasperation at what we thought was mere mule-headedness and half in jest. The echos of that jesting phase still dominate our terminology: "batshit crazy," "the dittoheads," "loons." But the jest drained away, drop by drop, as we've watched them become ever more agitated and disassociated from reality. We saw the rising tide of violent rhetoric and behavior at the Palin rallies during the election and in the growing faction of people who are clearly similarly detached from reality who are in Congress: Inhofe, Coburn, DeMint, Bachman, Steve King, Virginia Foxx, Paul Broun, Joe Wilson, Sue Myrick, John Shedagg . . . the list goes on. Indeed, someone really needs to do a head count among the Republicans in Congress and try to get some idea of what percentage of them are faking it and what percentage are, in fact, stark raving mad.

Reading the report in preparation for my planned blog on modern racism forced me to confront the fact that there's no joke left. The country is in the grip of what can only be described as pandemic mass psychosis. It is a psychosis nurtured, fed and, to some extent created, by certain large corporations that find in it a steady market for their media content. Now, however, the psychosis is self-sustaining. Through email and Internet sites, social networking media and mere word of mouth, they could keep it going indefinitely if Fox News and Rush Limbaugh disappeared tomorrow.

And that's not the scary part.

The scary part is that the ideology they are developing has strong overtones of religious, or quasi-religious, hysteria. They feel persecuted and alienated. They nurture a sense of grievance over being "mocked" (and that's reality based, at least--they are mocked.) They think of themselves as a rapidly coalescing "underground" movement confronting an existential threat to America and democracy and all that they think is good and true in America.

And therein lies the bitter irony enveloping the intractable dilemma these people present the nation: the only real threat to America and democracy is them. The threat is two pronged.

The first prong is the very real danger they represent to the continued existence of the Republican Party and, hence, to the continuation of two-party democracy. The Democracy Corp report is primarily focused on this problem. To put it plainly, these people have undermined the ability of the Republican Party to function as a political party in a two-party system. Many of us, myself included, have noted that the Republicans are no longer good faith participants in the project of governance. Instead, we've observed that they have been reduced to unconcealed nihilism, a marginalized special interest group whose interest is obstruction for its own sake. And yet, despite the GOP's wholehearted endorsement of the agenda of what they still think of as their base, that base is directing nothing but apoplectic fury at the GOP. They are furious with, and feel utterly alienated from, the GOP's elites because they (rightly) perceive that at least some of the GOP's politicians are only pretending to be as crazy like they are.

For all the talk of 2010 being another 1994, the dissociation of the hard right from reality, and the consequent alienation and fury directed to the GOP elite, has created a completely untenable, and possibly terminal, situation for the GOP going into the next midterms. If you study the numbers closely and factor in the Republican Party's complete lack of anything that can plausibly be portrayed as a positive agenda, a good case can be made that their optimism about their prospects next year is apiece with the delusional thinking that has gripped the party's base. It is a continuation of the kind of delusion that made them think that the selection of Sarah Palin was a huge game changer.

"Believing your own bullshit" is one of the classic fatal mistakes of politics. Yet, in every public pronouncement these days, Republican politicians invariably say things like "Americans have overwhelmingly turned against" this or that part of Obama's agenda when, in fact, the polling shows the exact opposite. Logically, the purpose of this rhetorical device is to create an MSM meme and convince the public they've caught a wave, yet, listening to them, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they believe it themselves. This is where the subtle racism I was going to write about comes into play: for most Republicans in Congress, "American" is synonymous with "white conservatives." If you're them and you see a lot of white people waving teabags, it's impossible not to conclude that "Americans" have "overwhelmingly" turned against Obama and the Democrat Congress. They see only their own numbers, the "real Americans" as they so often call them. All others, particularly brown others, are invisible to them. Indeed, there has long been a sense of grievance bubbling among many Republicans, sane and insane alike, that black and Hispanic votes count just as much as those of Real Americans.

Possibly I judge them too harshly. It could be that the GOP's elites are simply assuming that the anger of what they still think of as their base will prevail over a weakly motivated and dispirited left and assume that the indies will forget that the GOP caused the recession that's killing them. That may not be a bad bet for 2010. But that's beside the real point which is that, win or lose, the Republican base's disassociation from reality and alienation from the party elites creates a strong likelihood that 2010 will, in the long run, be catastrophic for the GOP.

If the the GOP loses seats in 2010, it will be in the competitive districts where Democratic or independent votes are needed, not the packed, deep-red ones that elect people like Bachmann and Broun. Such a loss will increase the pressure from the non-office holding party elites to abandon the base-crazies who will, rightly, be blamed for the loss. Among the base crazies, there will be retrenchment backed by their greater share of the elective offices than before the defeat. Given the GOP's already robust penchant for schismatic witch hunts and purging thought criminals, a loss in 2010 is a recipe for a civil war that could shatter the party.

However, if I'm wrong and the Republicans do win back Congress in 2010, they will be damned if they govern and damned if they don't. If they control Congress, the institutional imperative to cooperate with Obama in governing, even if only to the extremely limited and bitterly acrimonious extent that they cooperated with Clinton after the budget showdowns of 1995, will be powerful. The corporate interests need governance--their kind of governance, of course--to occur if they are to prosper. At a minimum, as we saw in the 90s, Congress has to pass a budget and the president has the veto. If they resist the imperative to govern, the resulting gridlock will result in rage and alienation among the indepentents, non-base Republicans and corporate interests who provide the campaign funds and the votes that are the party's only path back to power.

It is possible that such a win will also relieve the fear-fueling the insanity in the base, that the relief of having something to block the feared degeneration into dictatorship will defuse their anger and paranoia. (2006 had something like that effect on me, I must admit.) However, I expect that the palliation will be partial at best. Some millions will calm down and begin to see things in a less irrational light. Millions of others, however, will double down on the crazy. There are powerful forces with a vested interest in forestalling any cooling of the anger or re-association with conventional reality among the base. Fox News, talk radio, the NRA, the Dominionist project headed by Jim Dobson, and the right wing blogosphere do not prosper if these people calm down and start thinking clearly. And let's face it squarely, if they had tip-top critical thinking skills, they wouldn't idolize Beck, would they? Given that, I fear that after they get over the thrill of victory, the sight of Republicans in Congress even minimally engaging in governing, or doing anything other than rapidly achieving the destruction of Barack Obama and the evil Democrat Party, will likely cause the base's rage and alienation to explode and, once again, you have civil war within the party.

Democrats have institutionalized coping mechanisms for managing internal tension and factional strife. As the "big tent" party, they have had to do so and it's been that way for, quite literally, a couple of centuries now. Joining the victor on the platform is part of the Democratic Party's culture and tradition and it is built into the party's operating structure. Superdelegates were conceived as one such mechanism, for example. And even so, internal strife and factional infighting have often cost us dearly. That was the case in 1972 and 1980. It was almost the case in 1992. Depending on how you define "Democrat," one could argue that it also cost us the election in 2000. (Yes, this history is why I can sometimes degenerate into a unity troll.)

Republicans have no such mechanisms or structures. They've relied upon the quick selection process dictated by winner take all primaries and the streak of authoritarianism that has long marked its voters to paper over any little instances of discord. They are ideologically dedicated to homogeneity and they not equipped as a party to deal with serious factional disunity. Win or lose in 2010, the fault line between those who are associated with reality and those who are disassociated bears all the indicia of, to borrow William Seward's phrase, an irrepressible conflict.

So I continue to believe that the Republican Party is on the road to extinction. The forces are not aligned quite the way I foretold a year ago, but it's close enough. It is a house divided against itself. It may cease to exist altogether, or it may "become all one thing or all the other," but it cannot continue as it is now. Regardless of which side prevails in 2010, in the next few years the Republican Party stands a good chance of ceasing to be a meaningful political entity, perhaps for a few years, possibly forever. If that happens, we will, for some period of time, effectively become a one-party state and a one-party state is not really a democracy. Imagine a Democratic Party without meaningful electoral competition. Imagine the acceleration of corporate cooption and internal factional strife, the lethargy and self-satisfied moral and intellectual stagnation. Take a look at Mexico during the long period of Partido Revolucionario Institucional dominance and the Liberal Democrats in Japan between 1958 and 1990 if you want some idea of how it could look. Can we afford that now?

So that's the first threat that these people present to democracy. And, like I said, it's not the scary one.

The scary one derives from the fact that their "movement"--and increasingly, that's how they think of themselves--embraces tens of millions of people whose thinking is militaristic, hyper-nationalistic and, in many cases, dominated by a strain of apocalyptic authoritarian theocratic fundamentalism. They worship at the alter of the NRA and the fantasy of sturdy, self-reliant rugged individualists using their private arsenals to resist an oppressive government (ignoring, of course, the fact that their definition of "oppressive," is a government that's not oppressing the people that the hard right wants oppressed). They already feel persecuted and alienated. Whether they are ultimately the purgers or the purged, those feelings can only intensify.

Ten, twenty or thirty million people feeling extreme alienation from the political system, feelings of oppression and ridicule, militancy, apocalyptic fundamentalist theocratic religious beliefs. Economic, social and cultural location and consequent extreme anxiety. A certain level of actual military experience sprinkled among that population. And guns. Lots and lots of guns.

That's the recipe for terrorism. Don't think it can't happen here.

Do the math. Assume the group I'm talking about now gets boiled down to a hard core of ten million really crazy people as the rhetoric becomes ever more inflammatory. Assume one tenth of one percent of that ten million decides it is compelled to take up arms against an oppressive government that is hellbent on destroying liberty. That's ten thousand people. Assume five percent of the ten million are impressed enough with them to lend them active support in the form of money, shelter and supplies. That's a support network of half a million. And remember all the gnashing of teeth and disgust at the failure of "moderate" Muslims to condemn Osama Bin Laden?  How hard is it to imagine a similar kind of acquiesence by silence setting in here?

The training infrastructure already exists. There's already growing alarm at the increasing degree of networking among militia groups, anti-abortion extremists and Fourth Reich nuts. It could happen here. It already has. 

Note: I retitled this at the suggestion of Cville Dem.  The Halloween reference was a bad idea.  I think I was trying to lighten up my own mood after writing an unusually heavy, brooding post.  Hopefully, someday I'll look back on the content of this blog and laugh at my own alarmism, but for now, it isn't funny.   

For the last two months, I've been seeing people pissing and moaning about how Obama needs to "show some leadership" and "twist some arms" and "go LBJ" on the Senate to get the public option included in the legislation.  And while I've pointed out that Obama doesn't have access either to the kinds of unlimited and unregulated campaign money LBJ could command nor can he engage in the kind of out and out blackmail and extortion that were part of Johnso's toolkit, I've failed to make another point. 

That point is this: ninety percent of the stuff that became part of the Johnson arm-twisting legend was not public knowledge until after Johnson was gone.  It was generally known that he was a powerhouse of pursuasion, but the specific things he did or said to specific legislators to get a specific bill done were not contemporaneously known, because That's Not How it Was Done.  If Johnson gave you facts about what his bill would mean to your district, threatened to block your pet water project, promised you a secret stash of campaign bucks,  hinted that he had pictures of you banging your secretary, all while escorting you to a press conference to announce your support that you didn't know was happening, you didn't go and tell that to the New York Times the next day or the next month.  (Though It might, or might not, be alluded to in a story in "Look" or "Life" a year later, anonymously and in general terms.)

My point here is that people have been demanding something that doesn't happen--not now and not then.  They've been demanding public arm-twisting, that the cajoling, threatening and distribution of carrots that is, by definition, a back-room, process occur in public, in real time, for breathless, instantenous transmission across the Internets, because they believe everything they read and don't believe that anything they don't read about is occurring (other than shadowy plots to sell us out to the Corporate Illuminati, of course). 

Well, the arm-twisting is not happining in real time, but it has been and is happening. 

At least, that's what the Chicago Tribune says. 

WASHINGTON - -- Despite months of seeming ambivalence about creating a government health insurance plan, the Obama White House has launched an intensifying behind-the-scenes campaign to get divided Senate Democrats to take up some version of the idea in the weeks just ahead.

President Barack Obama has long advocated a so-called public option, while at the same time repeatedly expressing openness to other ways to offer consumers a potentially more affordable alternative to health plans sold by private insurers.

But now, senior administration officials are holding private meetings almost daily at the Capitol with senior Democratic staff to discuss ways to include a version of the public plan in the health care bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to bring to the Senate floor later this month, according to senior Democratic congressional aides.

Read the whole thing because, for some reason, this story doesn't seem to be getting much play in the blogosphere. 

The cynic in me suspects that might be because it runs counter to the entire "evil plot by Obama/Reid/Rahm Emmanual/Corporate illuminati to sell out all that is good and decent" narrative so many of them have worked themselves into over the last several months.  And, more fundementally, it challenges the rather widespread notion among modern Internet news consumers that the only stuff that happens (aside from evil plots by the Illuminati) is the stuff that happens in public. 

By now, my capacity for being amazed by the depths of the right's increasing insanity and the left's invariable tendency to to fall into dispair and bitter recrimination just at the moment victory (or something sufficiently close to be worth grasping) is within reach should be exhausted. 

But yes, it's really amazing to me how emotionally invested in failure some of you guys seem to have become on the public option front and, really, on pretty much everything.  Yeah, I'm talking about the comments on this post right here. 

There's good reason to believe that yesterday was the low point and there's a basis for measured hope in the fact that "as bad as it gets" wasn't as bad as it was supposed to be.  Call me crazy, but I think Schumer, Rockefeller and Harkin know at least as much about what's going on as we out here in the Land of Intertubes Commentia do and they're talking like winners.  Meanwhile, I have yet to see any of the opponents of the public option express optimism that they've managed to kill it. 

Five committees in Congress have jurisdiction over this thing.  Four of the five bills from those committees have a public option in them.  The Senate Finance bill, will probably have a triggered public option in it.  The middle ground between a triggered public option and a "robust" public option is Schumer's version of the public option.  If Finance goes with a triggered public option rather than Baucus and Conrad's lame-ass co-ops (or in addition to them), a betting man would have to give at least even odds that Schumer's public option is what will be enacted. 

Could it still all go to shit on us?  Yeah, sure it could.  To paraphrase the little Jedi guy, difficult to see, the future is. 

But don't you think that a bad outcome is at least a little more likely to happen if all the "progressives" decide to give up on the fight right at what could be the turning point and take a big ol' mass wallow in the Corporate Conspiracy Sty of Dispair?

Ask yourselves which is more imporant to you: a) a health care bill with a public option that's doesn't quite perfectly conform to your ideological ideal of perfection or b) the dark thrill having all your Naderist paranoia vindicated. 

If your answer is "a)," might I make a modest observation based on bitter personal experience? There is a profoundly important difference between preparing for the worst and expecting the worst.  Preparing for the worst is essential in life because, yeah, sometimes the worst happen and if you're not prepared for it, you're depending on random chance to keep from becoming a victim. 

But when you expect the worst, I'm here to tell you that that's what you're going to get in this life, damn near every time. 

It's not because of kismet, or instant karma or evil spirits.  It's because when you expect the worst, you're already in a place where you have actually come, at some level, to hope for the worst.  You hope for it because the vindication of your gloomy prognostications is the only reward you have left in life and, in any case, it's the pain you're used to, a chronic pain, as opposed to the sudden, sharp stabbing pain of seeing your hopes dashed yet again.  And when you come to hope for the worst, it's amazing how inventive our bizarre little subconscious minds can be when it comes to finding ways to either make it happen or, if it is beyond our ability to affect events, view whatever happens in the most negative possible light. 

So that's my trite advice for the day: optimism by temprament, pessimism by policy.  Hope (and work for) for the best even as you prepare for the worst. 

And expect nothing.   Because, though the future may or may not be foreordained, depending on your theology or your physics, human events are chaotic and unpredictable to those of us bound by the limits of human perception.   

When reading about some important political decision made by the reigning potentates of some past age, you invariably get one of those "okay, these people were not entirely like us" reminders when you get to the part about the pre-decision augury.  Until some time in the Eighteenth Century, no government on Earth, however constituted, would dream of taking a momentous decision of state without first engaging in some kind of superstitious rot.  Some civilizations tended to beseech the gods to look with favor upon their enterprise after they made the decision, while others sought divine guidance before making the decision.  Often they did both.  Thus, leaders of Greek city states always consulted with the Oracle of Delphi before declaring war, Roman priests cut open animals and closely examined their guts for signs of godly approval, and medieval kings prayed for divine guidance before declaring war and/or obtained the approval of some suitably impressive clergyman after they assembled the army. 

Often, of course, this was mere theatre, pure propaganda.  The rulers decided what they wanted to do and then used ritual to confer divine legitimacy upon their decision in the eyes of the ignorant rabble they ruled.  Just as often, however, the rulers were themselves as influenced by the superstitious rot as the ignorant rabble.  It seems to have depended not upon the civilization but, rather, upon the degree of personal piety of a given decision maker.  And, not infrequently, it worked both ways.  Roman leaders in particular seemed  have a propensity for cynically manipulating augury ceremonies for propaganda purposes only to themselves succumb to terrified impotence because of the appearance of some fearful omen during the execution of their plan. 

So you read about these people and you have your little snort of derision at the vast influence that superstition and ritualistic nonsense had on policy in pre-Enlightment history and take that into account in trying to make sense of their actions.  I do anyway. 

And then I looked at the ridiculously outsized role that CBO projections have come to play in our policy debates and I realized that, in fact, very little has changed. 

Now never let it be said that I am accusing CBO of slanting its estimates for political purposes.  CBO is not politicized except in the sense that it is driven by the normal bureaucratic imperative to continue to exist, which, in its case, depends upon the preservation, at all costs, of its reputation for being "non-partisan" and "sound" with both parties. 

And that's what makes the paramount importance that CBO estimates have assumed in the legislative process so utterly surreal.  CBO goes to great lengths to cultivate its reputation for being "nonpartisan" and "objective" and "straight-shooters" because if it lost it, its budget and importance would be at risk. But it is that same bureaucratic imperative that causes them to consistently overestimate the cost of, say, health care bills and imposes an institutional blindness to cost savings that can't be psuedo-quantified on the basis of something that was done in the past. 

Viewed in economic terms, CBO produces a product, guesses about the future cost of legislative proposals.  It's main competition in the production of that product is the White House Office of Management and Budget.  There are other minor competitors in D.C. in the form of various private foundations and think tanks, but, the market is dominated by CBO and OMB.  CBO thus goes to considerable effort to distinguish it's products from OMB's in a way that makes its products more popular and prestigious among those in a position to influence its budget and power. 

Turns out, that's pretty easy to do.  OMB, you see, is under control of a political appointee and thus more prone to use "rosy projections" to make the President's proposals look good. Everyone knows that.  Thus, all CBO has to do is say a given proposal will cost more and/or save less than OMB's projection claims and CBO's projection will be hailed by the Village MSM and the Congressional opposition (regardless of party) alike as being the very paragon of perfection in prescient prognostication. 

And, yes, it is, in fact, true that OMB tends to use assumptions more favorable to the President's position than CBO, but the extent to which it is true varies depending on who's president and who he's made head of OMB.  That variability alone, however, diminishes the Villagers' willingness to give credence to OMB estimates even during the times when the prevailing political winds blow in favor of making OMB estimates more "realistic." 

The end result is that unimpeachable, unshakable iron-clad Villager CW deems CBO's guesses to always be  better than anyone else's because they're "nonpartisan."  And, being, "better," they are invariably treated as infallible projections of the future such that to the extent cost is an issue in legislation, the CBO cost projection is treated as if it came directly from the Burning Bush to the ears of Moses.  Beyond question, beyond certainty, as firmly established as commandments carved onto stone by the very finger of God. 

And that's what's so bloody maddening.  Our whole political process is driven by a huge, glaring, obvious non sequitur.  One of the fundamental axioms of  Beltway CW is that "non-partisan" is synonymous with "truth," and indeed, "perfectly accurate" when, in fact, a lot of the methodological constraints CBO imposes upon itself to preserve it's all-important reputation for being "unbiased" substantially detract from their ability to more accurately SWAG future costs. 

And the truth is, even without the burden of self-imposed methodological constraints deemed necessary to preserve its reputation, any economic projection of events that are more than a year or two out is, in fact, pure SWAG--a Strictly Wild-Assed Guess (actual industry term, btw).  It is like trying to predict the number of hurricanes there will be in a season--literally impossible to do for functionally identical mathematical reasons. 

For all the methodological mumbo jumbo piously incanted in its reports, CBO projections have about as much relation to what's really going to happen in the future as the hydrocarbon-fueled gibberish spouted by the Oracle of Delphi.  The smugly confident certainty that infuses MSM reporting about CBO projections has about as much relation to what will really happen in the future  as the ambiguious riddles that the Oracle's intercessor would provide by way of translation of the Oracle's gibberish. 

And yet, there they are in the Capitol, right now, following the time-hallowed D.C. ritual.  They're making decisions that will affect millions of people for years to come on the basis of "projections" that have no more meaning than if they had simply asked some random stranger on the Metro to pick a number, any number, between seven hundred billion and 1.5 trillion.  Some in DC know the CBO SWAG Temple's prophecies are mathematical gibberish but gleefully use them to further their own ends.  Others are as pious and certain in their belief in them as Joan d'Arc was in her visions from the Blessed Mother. 

But even among the former, like the Roman politician who fixed the chicken gut ceremony but then recoiled in superstitious dead when a  dead bird dropped from the sky, each and every one of them has a superstitious dread of the number "one trillion,"  whether representative of projected expenditures over a year, a decade or a century. 

We're not so different from those old guys, after all. 

Just a few words that say it all from Factcheck.org's takedown of that email describing all the horrors to be unleashed on an unwitting America by the House health care reform bill that the teashirts have been waving around and ranting about all summer. 

Wondering where that thing came from?  Factcheck knows:

We can trace the origins of this collection of claims to a conservative blogger who issued his instant and mostly mistaken analyses as brief "tweets" sent via Twitter as he was paging through the 1,017-page bill.

Got that?  Some half-crazed wingnut flipping through a bill that was way above his reading comprehension level  tweeted out some witnutty nonsense between handfuls of Cheetos, created the illusion of "sourcing" by psuedo-citing to section numbers in the bill, and, presto, within a few weeks, millions are screaming their fool heads off and packin' heat to public gatherings. and Blue Dogs in Congress are restocking their depleted supply of Depends. 

And they called me a curmudgeon when I said that if I'd intentionally set out to invent a technogy to make people even stupider than TV had already made them, I couldn't have done better than the guys who came up with Twitter did.    

As so often happens when consequential people who were not actively malevolent die after a long illness, I've found myself more moved than I expected to be by Senator Kennedy's death.  Long-expected deaths following lengthy illnesses are like that.  Whether the person is a close relative or a famous person, the long illness fools us into believing that we've prepared ourselves for the inevitable and taken advantage of the advance warning to put their life into some kind of context in our minds.  Then, inevitably, we find in the event that all of our preparation and rumination was illusory.   

Thus did I find myself bawling like a baby at my grandmother's funeral several years ago.  She spent years--I started to say "many years," but it only felt that way--dying as successive TIA's and, later, full-blown strokes took her from us, and from herself, a piece at a time.  In the end, she died at a very ripe old age and we were all able to allow ourselves to feel relieved that it was over for her.  And, yes, for my mom who, for another seemingly very long time had been one of those old people caring for old people who have become such a fixture of our broken health care system.  So I thought I was sufficiently resigned and had her life sufficiently philosophically resolved that I would leave her funeral with my composure more or less intact.  And then I saw all of her remaining living friends, little old ladies who were the remnant of her church circle, distant relatives, perhaps a student or two whose life she'd touched during her forty-two years teaching elementary school and the four or five after her retirement when she taught Head Start.  All of them were absolutely shattered, clinging to each other and weeping in a way that was inconsistent with the amount of funereal experience you accumulate by the time you're their age.  

And it suddenly, all at once, it hit me, really hit me for the first time, how many lives she had touched.  I looked beyond the circle of my immediate family and realized for the first time that a pure white light had gone out and that the whole world was a little darker for her loss.   And thus it happened that about half a minute into a well-intentioned, but not very apt eulogy--our denomination believes in itinerancy of clergy and this one had come shortly before she became too sick to go to church--there I was in the front row at her funeral, crying like a child.  Despite all the advance warning, I hadn't really put her life into its true perspective until after she was gone.  I had always intellectually understood how many lives she had touched and it had always warmed my heart and made me proud of her, but I hadn't really grasped the meaning of that until she was gone.  So then I cried.  For them.  For all of those people outside my own family whose lives she had touched and for a world now ever-so-slightly diminished by her loss.  

That was ten years ago and I'm crying now, just writing about it.  

In the next few days, there will be a million eulogies for Ted Kennedy.  Among liberals especially, there will be a million more attempts to distill meaning and lessons for us all from his life and his career.  Inevitably, many of these will be more or less pure projection, attempts by the authors to inflate the importance of their own opinions and beliefs and desires by attaching them to the vastly more consequential figure of Ted Kennedy.  

This may well be one of them.  I don't know.  In the nature of things, it is also inevitable--somehow, I just seem to keep coming back to that  word today-- that those doing the projecting will be incapable of seeing that that's what they're doing.  At least, among those who are sincere rather than cynical and I flatter myself that I am at least sincere.  

To say Ted Kennedy was a larger-than-life figure for those of us who knew him only through the news is obvious.  Even trite.  To be honest, for a very long time, I was mad at him for running against Jimmy Carter in 1980.  No need to rehash why now.  With the self-righteousness of the young, I was, for a long time, also unable to separate his personal failings from his public service, particularly in the years just before Orrin Hatch and some others in the Senate basically did an intervention on him (an event that both evidenced and sealed their friendship).  And then, about twenty years ago, I had a mini-epiphany about Ted: the only proper yardstick by which to measure the life of a politician in a democracy is that of "net public good."  "Has this person, on balance and over the course of his or her career, done more good than harm for the people and, if so, how much?"  That's the test.  Certainly, personal factors are part of the measurement, and there are some personal failings so great that they can tip the "net public good" scale over to the "harm" side.    

It can be a deceptively complex measure.  Think about Lyndon Johnson--so much public good vs. so much harm from that wrong-headed, unnecessary war.  Or John Kennedy--a certain amount of public good in his tragically attenuated life vs. his very, very, very sordid, but, prior to is death, extremely private, personal life.  

But, in Ted's case, by 1990, looking back at all he had done, all he had fought for, all the harm he managed to avert during the Reagan years, it was easy to know where the balance was, Chappaquiddick included and notwithstanding.  And that was as of 1990, two decades before his career ended.   As it happened, that was an epiphany that later stood me in good stead during the Clinton administration.  You should never stop wanting or hoping or expecting for more and better from a politician, but, at the end of the day, or the end of the life, the thing that really matters when you're judging a person is whether he or she has, on balance, done more public good than harm.  

That's a lesson I taught myself because of Ted Kennedy, and it was, I thought, the key to putting his life and career into perspective as I've thought about them during the long melancholy coda of his final illness.  And, inevitably--there's that word again--I was wrong.  

I found out he'd died only this morning, when I awoke at 6:35 to the sound of NPR voices speaking of Ted Kennedy in the past tense.  Over the course of the day, as I read the inevitable (that makes six, I think) classless, hateful comments from the escapees from the freeper asylum, I realized that the real lesson, for me, anyway, of Ted Kennedy's life wasn't about his achievements as a public figure, after all.  Instead, it was about how he conducted himself as a Senator and what it teaches us about what, above all, it should mean to be a liberal.  It's a lesson summed up not by anything Senator Kennedy ever said, but, rather by something Medgar Evers said:  

 "When you hate, the only one that suffers is you, because most of the people you hate don't know it and the rest don't care."

 Therein, I think, lies the real meaning of Ted Kennedy's legacy in the Senate and as a liberal.  He was a ferocious and passionate champion of his causes and the most fearsome rhetorician in the Senate for decades.  He saw more personal tragedy, and had more reason to hate, than any one person should be expected to endure.  For decade after decade, he was, and even today still is, the target of the ugliest, most vicious, most vituperative invective that the angry right has been able to eject.  He was, and even today still is, the focus of all the burning, fear-tinged detestation of the growing millions of people in this country who have wholly given over their lives to the terrible consumptive drug of hatred.  

And despite all of that, through all of that, he never, to my knowledge, hated anyone.   His public anger, though often righteous and always fearsome, was also invariably transient.  In the Senate, he saw past, and through, the most profound and intractable political disagreements and saw personal friends.  Through whatever mental matrix he built out of the towering privilege he was born to and the unrelenting series of tragedies he endured, Ted Kennedy understood, at the elemental level, what Medgar Evers was talking about.  He understood that anger and hate are synonymous with futility and ineptitude in politics and a recipe for nothing but personal misery in life.  He knew, deep down knew, that "liberalism" entailed compassion and understanding for those who hate you as much, or more than for those who love and support you.  

Anger and fear and hatred have never been in short supply in America.  They fueled a century of massacre for the Indians and another century of brutal oppression enforced by murder and terrorism upon minorities following the end of the Civil War.  They are emotions that are the means by which people surrender their reason and their will to the unscrupulous.  Most of the time, in this country at least, those who are afraid and angry and hateful have been the playthings of the right.  The politicians of the left have dabbled in the hate-pen from time to time, but it has usually been the right that has most unapologetically wallowed in the sty.  In this country, at least.  

However, I don't believe there's been a time in this country since the ominous 1850s when one of the two major parties has been so utterly consumed and controlled by angry, fearful hatred.  It has been growing for a long time and I suspect it has still further to go before it burns itself out as it inevitably (seven) must.  Perhaps it is only that the individual haters are more visible now because there are so many fora in which they can express themselves.  Certainly, it is impossible to avoid it if you spend any time on the Internet.  You see it in the sick, feverish hatred that drenches the comments of the websites of every "mainstream" news source.  When morbid curiosity draws you to their own sites like Free Republic or Townhall or even the surreal pink nightmare of right wing vitriol that hillaryis44.org has become, you see it.  It spews into the airwaves 24/7 from mouths alternately gleeful and crazed.  It drips onto the editorial pages of major newspapers, disguised as erudition and "seriousness."  Voices of reason on the right these days are rare, reviled and increasingly cowed and coopted.  

And my greatest concern is that it seems to be spreading to our side.  All the years of abuse and all the injustice re-institutionalized during the Reaganite era left their mark on too many of us and, I fear, too many of us are becoming possessed by an opposite, if not equal, hatred all our own.  I see it not least it in our growing tendency to dehumanize our opponents and reduce them to propagandistic caricatures (granted, they aren't making it any easier for us to resist the temptation).  It's what makes me flinch a little when I see people here who regularly use terms like "Rethug" or "Repug" in their comments--not because I much care for them myself, but because it indicates that something bad is going on in the heart of someone on my side, who I may even, in some hazy, virtual sense, have come to care for.  It disconcerts me because both of those terms, and those like them, are far too reminiscent of the slurs people use to describe the enemy in a war as a means of muting the fact that their enemies are, in fact, fellow human beings. And yes, mea culpa, I use terms that are arguably just as dehumanizing sometimes. 

But, in this case, those enemies we're trying to dehumanize are, in fact, our countrymen.  If we, the liberals, the supposedly compassionate, empathic, humanistic ones, lose sight of that, what hope do we have left as a country?  

I have never been very good at keeping a good personalized hate going over the long haul.  I can keep detestation for specific politicians going indefinitely and that can flare up into momentary hatred from time to time, but I just find continuous seething hatred to be too much work for my fundamentally lazy nature to keep up.  The only exceptions, the only times I've been able to keep a steady, sustained hatred burning over a period of months have been the two or three times in my crazy twenties when it started out as love.  I'm not sure that those count as experiences comparable for whatever is fueling the vile comments and the inexplicably enraged people from the townhalls or the Palin rallies because, in each of my cases it would have--and sometimes did--flip right back into love in a heartbeat, given the proper stimulus. That's one of the reasons I became an instant devotee of "Casablanca" the first time I saw it, back in college.  At twenty, I knew exactly how Rick felt about Ilsa the first time I saw that movie.  What I do know from those experiences, however, is how intoxicating hatred can be.  How exciting and seemingly fulfilling, the same way addictive drugs are seemingly fulfilling, it can be.  

How frightening the thought of letting it go and living without it can be.  

People who are contemplating the thought of kicking a drug addiction feel that same fear.  The analogy of hate to an addictive drug is near perfect not least because it may not even be an analogy from a physiological standpoint.  Hate provides the same initial heady rush that it takes more and more to feel.  And like an addictive drug, there eventually comes a point where there's no amount you can take without killing yourself that will bring back the rush.  All that remains is the destruction of self, whether physical or mental, the self-inflicted suffering that you just can't quite quit.    

Ted Kennedy knew about self-destruction and, perhaps, even addition, but he didn't go there on hate.  Instead, he built long-lasting, deep, sincere friendships with people whose names, frankly, might induce us to spit on the ground.  In his early years, he rejected an overture from Nixon to implement a national health insurance plan because he wanted single payer and nothing else would do.  In later years, as the real alternative--nothing--wrecked greater and greater damage on the people of America, he regretted that, and similar, decisions and became an avid practitioner of incrementalism.  He didn't do it because he was a sell-out or a tool of the big corporations.  He did it because age and experience taught him that the accumulation of incremental change over a period of years can result in huge change over the long haul while absolutism can result in lost opportunities.  And as he pursued those incremental changes, the hearty humanism that allowed him to see friends hidden behind opposing ideologies bore fruit, as time and again it allowed him to pick off a critical vote here and there on particular bills from among the ranks of his usual opponents.  

Senator Kennedy's incrementalism did not always serve him, his party, or his ultimate goals well.  Sometimes, it led to what, in hindsight, were lost opportunities and outright blunders.  But then he could say the same thing about the perfectionism of his younger days.  There's a lesson for us there, too, I think.  

However, I believe the more important lesson is that throughout his career the red-faced anger he could work up on the Senate floor on behalf of those who were getting a raw deal was fierce but always fleeting.  It is those booming laughs and quiet acts of kindness that will echo around the chamber for years to come.  I hope that for us on the left--from the barely left to the center left to the far left--I sincerely hope that we make that his real legacy.  Let us fight fiercely and passionately for that which we believe but let us hold on to our compassion even for those who hate us, however hard they try to make us let it go.    

Rest in peace, Senator Kennedy.  Thank you for your service. 

Okay, for anyone who hasn't been on top of the last two thousand or so one minute Internet news cycles, the long-dreaded, much anticipated sell out occurred.  Obama sold out all of us who worked so hard for him to the insurance companies or the Republicans or possibly the people who make Vicks Vaporub or something.  And we're all just really, really mad about it.  Not me, 'cause I'm too emotionally drained from my three days of being mad at John Mackey, but as soon as I recharge my anger batteries, I'll be mad too, unless, as seems to happen from time to time, whatever it is we're mad about turns out not to have been true. 

That's the difference between us and the Republicans.  When we find out what we were mad about wasn't true, we stop being mad about it and move on to the next thing. Republicans, by contrast, never let the mere fact that the thing they were mad about was a lie get in the way of keeping a good rage going. On the contrary, truth can never be bad enough to work up the kind of all-consuming rage that it takes to be a Republican these days. 

Anyhoo, just to recap, on Sunday, Secretary Sebelius dropped some broad hints--immediately seized upon by our ever professional political press as THE only thing she said on Sunday of any consequence--that the Administration might be willing to sign a bill without a publically run insurance company as long as there's some equivilent mechanism that provides real competition for the insurance companies which, she was too polite to mention, are essentially participants in a rather massive tacit monopolistic conspiracy.  Meanwhile Conrad went on Fox and blathered the same crap he's been blathering for a couple or three weeks now about the votes not being there for the public option. 

Immediately, "progressives" threw a big Intertubes hissy that's gone on for better than a thousand news cycles now. 

However, being, as I mentioned, fortuitiously too tired of being mad to get mad for some whole other reason, I noticed something kind of interesting. 

On Sunday, Sebelius broadly hints that we might give up on the public option to get Republicans on board and today, less than 1700 news cycles later, the RNC comes out and says no, even that's not enough--your "co-ops" reek of competition for the insurers which, being free market purists, we will resist to the the last bullet.  Which, you may have noticed, is not necessarily a metaphor with us these days.

And that's when I started wondering.  Is this what Obama and Emmanuel and the other smart folks in the White House were after all along?  Did they cook this entire thing up to smoke out the Republicans, call their bluff? Was the entire purpose of the exercise to provoke Republicans into admitting that even if Democrats get onboard with Kent and Max's excellent adventures in bipartisanship and give away the whole deal in return for a J.C. Penney give card with $24 left on it and a piece of slightly used gum that Grassley scraped off the bottom of the conference table, they're still not going to vote for it?

In short, did they send Sebelius out to reenact the Munich Pact (or possibly the Vichy governent or Tokyo Rose--Republicans are so much better with these half-literate historical comparisons than we are) in order to provoke a response from the Republicans that would force Conrad, Baucus, Nelson, Landrieu and the House Blue Dogs to face up to reality?  Specifically, to the reality that they're just jerking off, that there is no deal to be had that gets them what they most crave--Republican cover to protect them from attacks from the right next time they're up for reelection.  And that they're going to have to man (or woman) up and pick a side, at least to the extent of voting on the cloture motion. 

Could they really be that smart that they could predict the Republican response to offers of  giving up on the public option?

And the answer, my answer, at least, is I just don't know.  I don't even know enough to have an opinion.  I'm honestly not even hazarding a guess.  No one ever accused me of being less than a full on supporter of Obama, but even I am not prepared to claim they're that smart.  They're scary smart, but smart enought to foresee the Republican response with sufficient certainty to go ahead and provoke yet another liberal snitstorm to do it?  They have better info than we do.  They've got more political skills than any White House team in decades.  But I still don't know. 

What I do know is this.  Stuff like this keeps happening to them.  Time and again during the campaign and throughout his presidency, they've done stuff that seems inexplicable, wrong or ill-advised, or even a Betrayal of All For Which We Worked so Hard for and Gave so Much, and a few days or weeks later, it turns out to have been exactly the right thing to do despite the fact that it made those of us who already supported them all sweaty and angry. 

If you play cards, sometimes you run into someone who you think is a lucky fool, but who keeps leaving with your money in his pocket.  At a certain point, you are compelled to stop attributing it to luck and play pots against such people on the assumption that they know what they're doing.  But I've also found that when when people are inclined to attibute awe-inspiring skill to me for a play that was really just blind luck, it's best to just let them do it.  And in any case, it's not clear where luck ends and skill begins because most of the time "luck" is what happens to people who maximize their opponents' opportunities to make mistakes.  And whether they herded the RNC into this or whether they just got lucky, the fact remains that this snide press release was a huge mistake.  

I am not endorsing or advocating a boycott of Whole Foods.  I am not participating in a boycott of Whole Foods.  I like their store brand milk.  It is the only place hereabouts where one can, on occaision, obtain El Rey milk chocolate.  Most important, it is the only local supplier of the brand of cat food that my aging cats will a) eat and b) not puke up all over the damn place. 

I am, however, for the foreseeable future, determined to cut back drastically on the ridiculous amount of money I've been spending there weekly over the last couple of years.  And, yes, it is because I am immortally pissed at the company's founder and CEO.   

Here's why. 

If Mackey had said this stuff back in January, it might have been different because, iIn January, the possibility of having a reasoned debate on healthcare reform had not yet been totally blown to smitherfuckingreens by the people on his side of the fight. 

Had he said this stuff then, it would have helped if he'd said "okay, I know my customers will disagree with me, but I want to humbly share a few thoughts on health care." And it would have helped if he'd said it in a forum other than the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.  Had he done that, I would likely have said--as, indeed, I was almost inclined to say when this thing first broke--"okay, he's a libertarian moron, I knew that.  Not an uncommon phenomon among people in the organic food biz, so get over it."   

However, he didn't say it in January, he didn't say it in a guest editorial in the New York Times and he started the whole thing off with a snide quote about socialism from Margaret Thatcher. Then he then moved directly into deficit fearmongering based upon the fundementally dishonest assumption that the deficits we're running now will be recurring rather than being caused by the dip in tax revenues caused by, and the stimulus package necessited by, the recession his Randian co-religionists caused.  

The WSJ news operation is a respectable and respected edifice of journalism.  The editorial page is a stinking, fetid cesspit of mendacity and vitriol annexed to that edifice.  It is one of the most important vectors for the pandemic of lies and dogmatic nonsense that has been poisoning our discourse for the last twenty years.  To go there, of all places, to say things that your liberal customers will disagree with is a lot like the message Reagan sent when he went to Philidelphia, Mississippi to give a speech on states rights.  

Beyond even that, however, I think many of us who are focusing our ire on Mackey are doing so as part of the process of facing up to the ugly reality created by our opponents on the right.  We realize that, on this issue at least, the possibility of rational discourse between left and right no longer exists.  We wanted a rational debate.  We elected a president who campaigned on the principle that we had to start having rational policy debates again.  We fervantly supported him in no small part because we agreed with him on that point. 

And for all that, on this issue, the possibility of rational discourse  is dead, dead, dead.  And no matter how much our tsk-tsking Broderized MSM craves to blame it on both sides, it was the Republicans and their libertarian and corporate allies who killed it.  They made a calculated, decision to kill rational debate on this subject, by any means necessary, solely to serve and perpetuate their own narrow political and economic interests. 

They declared war when we were offering them an olive branch in the rhetorical wars of the last two decades and they announced the start of the war with the rhetorical equivilent of a barrage of poison gas shells that has never ceased.  A barrage that has, if anything, only increased in intensity and fury and toxicity.  They keep lobbing more and more shells into the that hovering cloud of toxic rhetoric they've unleashed over No Man's Land not least because they want to ensure that no one else on their side of the wire can cross over to ours to discuss the resumption of rational discourse. 

At this point, here and now, the reality of the situation is that it is no longer possible for the Right to reinitate rational discussion on health care merely by talking to our side in a rational fashion.  At this point, if Mackey, or anyone else on the other side of the health care fight, wants to have a rational discussion with us, it is incumbent upon them to first denounce the maniacs on their side who are so gleefully poisoning our nation's discourse.  If they want to have a rational discussion with us, they must first tell the people on their own side to cut this shit out.  

Mackey didn't do any of those things.  All he did was utter a few rational, if wrong-headed, thoughts while firing off his own personal barrage of rhetorical mustard gas shells. 

Back after the George W. Bush anti-enforcement SEC closed its file on its investgation of Mackey's comments (under a screen name) about a competitor on Yahoo stock discussion boards, Mackey did a long post on the WF blog.  Here were some of the things he said he had "learned:"

MISTAKE IN JUDGMENT, NOT ETHICS: My mistake here was one of judgment--not ethics. I didn't realize posting under a screen name in an online community such as Yahoo! would be so controversial and would cause so many people to be upset. That was a mistake in judgment on my part and one that I deeply regret because it caused so much negative media attention about me and Whole Foods Market.

BECOMING A PUBLIC FIGURE: Perhaps part of the problem here is that when I first started participating in these Yahoo! online communities back in 1998, Whole Foods Market was only 15 percent as large as we are today. . . I wasn't a public figure and had no desire to become one. However, as Whole Foods Market continued to grow and as we opened large and exciting new stores around the United States, both the company and I became better and better known. At some point in the past 10 years I went from being a relatively unknown person to becoming a public figure. I regret not having the wisdom to recognize this fact until very recently.

***

KEY LEARNINGS: I've learned many things from these events. The primary lesson I've learned is that because of Whole Foods Market's success, I have become a public figure. My personal and work lives are now closely connected--and impact one another. Anything I say or do is now at risk of showing up on the front page of a national daily newspaper and therefore, I need to be much more conscious about the implications of everything that I say or do in all situations.

The price of continuing to be the CEO of a large publicly traded corporation is pouring yourself a big cup of STFU whenever you are tempted to say something that will piss off your customers. It's not a free speech issue, it's a matter of personal choice.  Would I rather have the freedom to say things that will piss off my customers, or would I rather serve my shareholder's interests and, in return, continue to earn huge amounts of money and exercise great power?  Cake.  Eat it.  Pick one.    

Mackey purported to have learned that lesson. 

Whole Foods' entire business model consists of serving an extremely liberal--compared to the demographic of grocery customers in general--customer base. Beyond its product line, Whole Foods deliberately cultvates customers who are politically active and engaged in issues, engaging in many "feel good" activities specifically designed to make shopping at Whole Foods feel ethical and, dare I say it, politically correct.

And yet, despite the lessons he claims to have learned from his misadventures on the Yahoo stock board posting, he went out of his way say stuff that seemed calculated with malice aforethought to offend and anger his company's customers at a time of high emotion. 

And he did it in the one forum short of the New York Post or Fox News most perfectly calculated to enhance their rage.  

However sincere he may, himself, be, he has publicly and wholeheartedly allied himself with people who, in a very real sense, have declared war on democracy itself.  He has said nothing about the continual barrage of lies with which his allies are poisoning our civic culture.  Instead, he added to the pollution  He chose, even went far out of his way, to piss me and the rest of his customers off. 

Well, fuck him.  I am still free to decide how I spend my money and I decline to reward him for spitting in my face.  If the collective effect of similar decisions brings hardship to his suppliers who may agree with me, well, then I'd say they need to let John know he's created a problem. 

Cake.  Eat it.  Even CEO's can can pick one, and only one, John.   

Today, on Talk of the Nation, they had a fair and balanced discussion of the "passionate" debate at the town halls that featured, as guests people reperesenting both sides of the issue.  On one hand, they had a lady who was firmly in the "well, gee, I don't know about this bill or anything, but it's all getting kind of raucus and it seems like Obama's trying to do too much too fast," camp and, in the studio, a Republican robot programmed with the Luntz talking points who was very concerned that these noble protesters voices were being denigrated by the elite press.  Didn't really hear from that guest who was actually for reform. 

There's been a lot of bleeting in the MSM over the town hall ragers.  A lot of careful avoidance of how willfully stupid they're being and how impossible it is to have a debate with people whose response to being told easily verifiable actual facts is "I DON'T BELIEVE YOU, SO THERE!"  There's a lot of concern over how hurt and angry they alll are along with a remarkable obtuseness over how much of the rage is the result of seemingly seeing their long-time nightmare of brown people taking over the country coming true right before their horrified eyes.  There've been a lot of pious invocations of democracy and there's been a lot of touching concern for the fact that they're Americans too and they deserve to be heard. 

I've been listening to all that and I hope you don't mind, but I kind of feel the need to point out a glaringly obvious point that seems to be eluding you and certain members of Congress. 

THEY'RE A MINORITY AND THEY LOST THE LAST FRAKKING ELECTION IN WHICH HEALTHCARE REFORM WAS A MAJOR ISSUE!!!!!!!!!

Even if the people who want healthcare reform are a minority too, they're a bigger minority than the people shouting about the crazy, made-up fearfacts. 

Yeah, the scared angry people's voices count.  But don't ours? 

I know they're better TV.  That's what the corporations pumping the gasoline onto the fire were counting on.  But again, echoing though it does Nixon's pathetic, mendacious invocation of "the great silent majority," I have to ask, why do their voices count for more than ours?  What is different about this minority that makes you so much more solicitious of their viewpoint than you've been of any other minority in recent history, like, say, just for example, those of us who thought getting into the Iraq War was a bad idea back in 2002 and 2003?

Just wondering.   

Dear Kent,

Do you mind if I call you Kent?  I'm sure it will be okay because, after all, this isn't really a letter to you or one that you'll ever hear of or would even give a tinker's damn about if you did, coming, as it does, from a dirty, angry, foulmouthed  person on the blogs.  Instead, it's a really just a cheap and rather hackneyed rhetorical device, the "open letter," I believe it's called, where I make an argument by pretending to write to you and pretending you'll read it.  And, for good measure, I'll also go ahead and pretend like anything you've done on healthcare has ever been done in good faith or in the best interests of anyone except your well-heeled health care industry donors.   

So, anyhoo, Kent, I see the leaks are finally out about what your buddy Max and his pals Sue and Sen. Crankytwitter and that other guy have been working so hard on these many weeks and I'm assuming that either they're so out of touch they need to float trial balloons to see how it will fly with the other Dems or, alternately, they're unauthorized leaks by people who are trying to kill it. 

And, well, Kent, pretending, as I am that you've been acting in good faith and looking at how much of the farm you and your friends have already traded away, there's something I really need to ask you. Over the weekend, when you and the other Republicans were doing the Sunday shows, you said something really perplexing to me.  You said:

CONRAD: Look, there are not the votes for Democrats to do this just on our side of the aisle. This is going to require...

STEPHANOPOULOS: So it's just not possible to have a Democrat-only bill?

CONRAD: No, it is not possible, and perhaps not desirable either. We're probably going to get a better product if we go through the tough business of debate, consideration, analysis of what we're proposing... 

 That's what you said, Kent.  And the reason I found that perplexing was that I couldn't see how it could be that you need Republican votes because the Democratic votes to get it done aren't there when, at least as I understand it, Democrats control both houses of Congress and there are even 60 Democratic senators. 

Clearly, you're saying that you need to troll for Republican votes because there are Democrats who won't vote for it.  Got that. But, if that's true, I was wondering if you could tell me which Democrats it is you think won't vote for health care reform, 'cause I have this neat idea.  I was thinking maybe that rather than negotiating furiously with three Republicans, you might try negotiating with those Democrats instead.  I mean, no matter how far right those Democrats are, they can't be as far right as the Republicans. Surely you and Max could get at least as good a deal from them as you could from the Republicans. I'd like to think you could do even better. 

And besides, Kent, you know and I know that in the end, those Republicans are going to screw you and blame you for their having to do it.  They are going to screw you because McConnell and Conryn have already made it clear that they'll do the same thing to anyone who doesn't stay in lockstep on this that they did to Jim Bunning--cut off their funds and undermine them.  So in the end, you'll give away the farm to get those three Repbulican votes, won't get them anyway (except, just possibly, from Collins), so if the bill is to get past the inevitable filibuster, it will depend on whether those Democrats whose votes you say aren't there will vote for cloture. 

So, again, why aren't you negotiating for the votest of those unnamed reluctant Democrats instead of with the rump Rational Republican Caucus, which, as we both know, will screw you in the end?  Why not find out what has to be done to the bill to get the reluctant Democrats to at least vote for cloture? 

I know you're a very busy and important man and there's some important event you have to get to with some important lobbyists or something, but just a thought, Kent.  Noodle on it a bit, kay? Thanks, a load.