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. 

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.   

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. 

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.   

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.  Romans 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 "square-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. 

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.    

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. 

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, 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.   

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.   

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.   

Should Mr. Obama abandon efforts to reach out to Republicans, he risks damaging his appeal among independent voters, who have a history of being put off by overt partisanship.

Right, Adam.  Those independent are so totally oblivious that they're going to blame Obama for being overtly partisan in this thing. 

And obviously, the need for holy bipartisanship is crucial.

In addition, the go-it-alone course could cost Mr. Obama and, more important, Congressional Democrats political cover should the health care plan prove ineffective, unpopular or excessively costly before the 2010 or 2012 elections.

It could also set a polarizing pattern for the remaining three years of Mr. Obama's first term, complicating his efforts to get through an ambitious agenda by forcing him to rely only on Democrats for votes.

"Technically he may be able to pass the bill in one of these big complex areas without bipartisan support, but it won't be as good a product, and I suspect he'll lose the support of the country in the process," said Senator Lamar Alexander, the chairman of the Republican conference.

"There's a huge price to be paid," he added. "Bipartisanship is absolutely possible and it's absolutely necessary, even when you have a Democratic president with huge majorities."

Heavens, that does sound serious.  Clearly, there is no sacrifice too great, no means of paying for it too regressive or irresponsible, no compromise too immoral, no sell out too extremeto assure that this bill is blessed by and consecrated with holy bipartisanship. 

Somehow Adam has failed to notice that the leading lights of the Republican Party are making absolutely no effort to even pretend that their plan isn't to kill reform outright.  I guess that part of the story is both anathama becuase, hey, the Village Media drinks cocktails with these fellows and they're really not so unreasonable.  And, besides, that storyline  is tainted because it's being reported by dirty fucking hippy bloggers. 

However, the mad elephant rampaging around the room is too noisy and destructive to be completely ignored.  Good Christamighty, even Evan Effing Bayh can see it.

"I wouldn't even have hesitated two, four years ago when the numbers were so close: It would have been absolutely yes on bipartisanship," said Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana.

He said he still believed it was important, but added, "The Republicans are reduced to a core, so there aren't that many pragmatists left to work things out."

: Yup. Blind pigs, acorns yada yada. 

Read the story and then weep that this banal drivel came from a guy who's supposed to be one of the star reporters at the preeminent journalistic institution in the country.  Since Cronkite's death, I've been pondering how bad things have gotten, how truly toothless and coopted journalism has become in just three decades.  And I keep circling back to the question of whether they that stupid or is it that think we are?  And, sadly, I'm finding it harder and harder to avoid the conclusion that the answers are "yes" and "yes." 

This time, however, it's got nothing to do with race.  And it has a lot less to do with "liberal" than with "libertarian."  At least for me. 

I am not excorcised about the Gates arrest because The Man was hassling a brother for doing nothing and my guilty white liberal heart bleeds for him. 

That's not to say I am insensitive or unsympathetic to what may (or may not) have set Gates off.  I get that black people, and in particular, black men, often, perhaps invariably, have a fraught relationship with the police.  I even recall the time it really hit home to me how bad it was.  During the very bad year of unemployment after I graduated from law school into the 1991 recession, I managed to total two cars in six months. My insurer tagged me as the at-fult party in both, cancelled my insurance and put me into the bad risk pool.  What with the joblessness and the injuries from the second wreck and the pittance I got for the second car and the impossibility of obtaining anything except very expensive liability coverage, I really didn't have any choice but to buy a cheap, POS heap.  Having been in two wrecks, I was also inclined to buy the biggest effing 70s Detroit battletank I could wrap around myself, at least until I got over the flashbacks. Even after I finally got a job, I had to keep that embarassing, baby pee yellow '77 Mercury main battle tank while I dug out from under the the worst of the debt, rebuilt my credit and waited for the wrecks to drop off my insurance record. 

So much for the background.  First year associates keep crappy hours sometimes, so one night, about two in the morning, I was driving the baby pee tank home after a long night rewriting a brief whose manifold deficiencies had been identified in red ink by older and wiser attorneys. I was boating down a deserted thoroughfare, my head still back in the office, and, suddenly, out of absofrakknglutely nowhere, I was surrounded by police cars and blue lights.  I hadn't been speeding.  I didn't have any burned out lights.  I hadn't swerved or driven erratically or run any lights.  As I pulled my car over, turned off the ignition and waited the seven or eight infuriating seconds it always took the heap's engine to stop chugging, I knew, with crystal clear certainty, that I had been pulled over for Driving While Black.  I thought that was funny. 

It didn't take a psychic to figure it out.  I was driving a gigantic 70's car with oxidized baby pee yellow paint in the wee hours of the morning. And I was doing this in a southern town where race relations were at a low ebb due to a couple of high-profile trials of black men accused of violent attacks (one fatal, one nearly so) on young white women.  So when I rolled down the window and the cops saw a young white professional in a suit and a silk tie behind the wheel, the change in their demeanor as they whiplashed through grim and on guard, to nonplussed, to partially concealed rueful amusement was comical.  They told me they'd been following me for two or three miles (yeah, I was that tired and distracted) and that I hadn't signaled when I turned onto the thoroughfare.  They told me to drive carefully and sent me on my way.  

And then, on the way home, it stopped being funny to me.  Failure to signal?  Are you kidding me?  In North Carolina, people use turn signals in two and only two situations:  when they're merging onto the Interstate (because otherwise, the folks on the Interstate might think your intention is to drive the car into the ditch to the right of the shoulder) and when they're in a dedicated turn lane (especially one with a a green arrow traffic light and a sign indicating that turns in the other direction are forbidden).  Other than those two scenarios, North Carolinians stubbornly resist committing themselves to a turn in advance.  Maybe they think its rude to go telling folks that they have to watch out for you 'cause maybe you're fixin' to turn, when there's a tiny chance you may change your mind before you get there.  Using a turn signal in this state anywhere other than a dedicated turn lane or an on-ramp is so rare that it is actually probable cause to pull you over and give you a field sobriety test. 

Those cops thought they saw a poor black man driving around at 2:00 in the morning and  equated that to a high likelihood of up-to-no-goodness in progress, so they used a completely bogus pretext to pull me over.  Which I already knew, but as I merged onto the Interstate (without signalling--I still wasn't fully assimilated in those days), it finally hit me, really hit me, what a lifetime's accumulation of episodes like that would do to me.  How much unreleased rage could build up over time as you had to swallow down your anger and fear and be polite to wary, taciturn cops who pulled you over for no reason other than to interrogate you about what you were up to and run your licence for warrants. 

So in my own Wilbur Whitebread walked in his brother-man's shoes for about .05 seconds way, I get the baggage that every police interaction with a black man carries. 

And that good white liberal's understanding of the plight of the black man has absolutely nothing to do with why the Gates arrest strikes a nerve with me and gets me pissed off enough to keep commenting long after I, and everyone else, should let it go. 

No, I am exorcised about this episode because THE GUY WAS IN HIS OWN GODDAMNED HOME.  Yes, he somehow managed to piss off the cop.  Yes, the cop in question may be the greatest cop who ever lived and the greatest humanitarian since Mohandas K. Ghandi.  Yes, he may have been a great cop and a great human being  who just was having a rare bad day and was really annoyed and Gates may have been acting like a complete asshole who was dumping a lot of grievance-laced dung on a solid guy who was just doing his job. I don't know any of that, but I am willing to assume it for the purpose of my point, which is that even if Gates was being a complete asshole to Sgt. Ghandi, he was being an asshole after his identity had been established, after it was clear that no crime or emergent situation was in progress and--this is the important part here, so follow along with me, please--IN HIS OWN GODDAMNED HOME.

Being an asshole, even to a cop, is not a crime.  And I'm not just saying that that's a thing that oughta be true.  As I noted in a comment on another post, under Massachusetts law, "to be disorderly, within the sense of the statute [that Gates was charged with violating], the conduct must disturb through acts other than speech; neither a provocative nor a foul mouth transgresses the statute." Commonwealth v. LePore, 40 Mass. App. Ct. 543, 546, 666 N.E.2d 152, 155 (1996).  Similarly, in Commonwealth v. Lopiano, 60 Mass. App. 723, 805 N.E.2d 522, 525 (2004), the Massachusetts Court of Appeals found no "violent or tumultuous behavior," where the defendant, "flailed his arms and shouted at the police" about alleged violations of his civil rights upon being informed he was being summonsed to court (but not arrested) for assault and battery.  (And, unlike Gates, Lopiano was in a public place.)

Further, I definitely don't want anyone to take away from this post that I've got a problem with cops per se.  My dad was a cop until I was about five, when he was asked to take some classes on fire fighting and start a fire department for the tiny (pop. 6000) town I grew up in.  Even after he became fire chief, the fire and police deparments faced each other on opposite sides of the garage that housed the fire trucks. Even as the town grew explosively and both departments grew busier, day in and day out, they shot the shit with each other between calls, played rough jokes on each other, ate each other's food, drank each other's coffee. 

And even after he moved on to other things, my Dad's long association with the local P.D. got me out of many a youthful misadventure without an arrest or a mortifying escort home.  Many's the time that a local cop looked at my license, put my name with my Dad's, asked me if he was his boy and then sent me on my way with an admonition to get home and stay out of trouble.  That probably would not have been enough, however, if not for my Dad's lessons in how to behave if you're stopped by the police.  He trained all of us from a very young age to be polite when them, to never give them a hint of attitude and always act respectful.  And I do respect cops as a rule.  I respect them immensely.  I appreciate them for keeping us safe.  I know how many of them are fundementally good-hearted men and women who hide a genuine desire to serve and protect behind a shield of machismo. I get that they have deal with a parade of stupid mopes so I don't have to.  I  appreciate that they encounter dangerous situations and deal with the stress created by not knowing which situations are going to turn out to be dangerous.  I particularly understand that they deal, day in and day out, with horrible situations that range from the merely emotionally draining to the utterly devestating, situations that would turn me into basket case in a week.   

And all that being true, I still think the important thing to recognize here is that even assuming Gates was being a complete turd--which I don't know--he was also an old man whoi walked with a cane who was, and--I hate to say it yet again, but people don't seem to be grasping the that this is the critical ssue here--HE WAS IN HIS OWN GODDAMNED HOME when he was arrested.  Sgt. Crowley's report clearly states that Gates' identify and ownership of the house had been established before he was arrested as had the lack of a crime to investigate.  And even if Gates followed the the cop outside, and even if he continued to berate the cops after he got out there, Gates was still, under the law, IN HIS OWN GODDAMNED HOME.  That's right, his porch and his sidewalk were still his home.  Contrary to what a lot of people here seem to believe, your porch, your front yard and all of the property surrounding the house, and not visably separated from it are, to use the legal term, "curtilage."  Curtilage is the area outside your home that the law treats as identical to the interior of your home for purposes of the Fourth and Fifth Amendements and for purposes of determining the scope of a police officer's license to be on your property. 

And for those saying that, even if he was legally deemed still in his home, Gates was properly arrested because he was disturbing the peace by taking the ruckus outside where people could hear and see it?  Please.  It's not like saintly Aunt May next door was disturbed in the quiet enjoyment of her tea and knitting by whatever Gates was saying to Sgt. Crowley.  Instead, she like everyone else in the vicinity, was already outside watching the show.  How do I know that?  Besides the fact that its in Crowley's report?  I know it because when a bunch of police cars pull up in front of your neighbor's house with the piercing, seizure inducing arrays of twenty or thirty blue and white flashing strobe lights and with all the unmistakable beeps and fascinating snatches of cryptic, but loud, radio chatter, it draws people out onto the street like iron filings to a magnet.  That magnetic effect is why they invented yellow police tape and the phrase "move along folks, show's over, nothing to see here."  If Gates' neighbors had any peace, it had already been disturbed long before Gates and Crowley took it outside, and, at that point, the neighbors were just spectators at the freakshow.  To suggest that whatever additional ruckus Gates might have added when he took his rant outside was distrubing to them is absurd.  If anything, it was just a bonus attraction to the show. 

What probably was disturbing to them, however, was seeing their aged neighbor cuffed, put in a patrol car and driven Downtown for booking simply because he was vigorously expressing his low opinion of the cops on his property.  He was arrested for pissing off an ordinarily good cop who had to know the arrest was bogus but who also knew he had the ability to humiliate and inconvenience the annoying old man, free of consequences. 

My Dad taught me to respect cops and to be respectful and polite to them.  He also, however, made it clear that one reason you do that isn't necessarily because you actually respect all of them, but, rather because some cops come to expect obsequiousness and instant obedience as their due, as their right.  And if the ones who think they're entitled to it don't get it, they can and will abuse their authority by running you in on some bullshit charge--disturbing the peace being a favorite--or, worse, busting your head.  Worse still, whether it's a bogus arrest or a busted head or both, they know that as long as their partner tells the same story, they will always beat you in court unless someone gets it on tape.  Hell, sometimes they win despite someone getting it on tape. Some of them feel that way all the time.  Most all of them feel that way once in a while. After all, they're human beings doing a tough, hard, dangerous job for society for too little pay.  Even for hte best of them, it would only be human to occaisionally feel underappreciated and to succomb to the temptation of the power they are given.    

And that, in a nutshell, is what bothers me about this episode. It's not about race, or about charges of racism, or about being a good liberal.  It's not about whether Sgt. Crowley is a good guy or a bad one or whether Gates was calm or over the top.  And it is most definitely not about old fights over whether charges of deliberate race-baiting during the primaries were justified or whether Obama cynically and mendaciously played the race card.  

Instead, it's about the simple, important, fact that, cops, by and large and most of the time, deserve our respect, but they are not entitled to it.

That easily overlooked distinction between "deserve" and "entitled" is critically important. That distinction is one of the sticks in the bundle of  important little things that, in the aggregate, distinguish a democracy from the authoritarian shitholes that were the plague of the 20th Century.  We, as free citizens, have a right to be secure in our homes and in our persons from unreasonable searches and arrests.  The sanctity of the home as a place where the individual is sovereign and the power of the state is limited is something precious.  It's a concept that our political forebears clawed away from the state, a tiny bit at a time, often at great cost, beginning with a bunch of bullying aristocrats who forced a bullying king to sign a Great Charter acknowledging some limitations on his own power. 

Within the confines of his home, including the curtilage, Gates had a right to be an asshole to anyone, cops included, as long as he wasn't threatening imminent physical harm.  This entire notion that he "deserved it" or "asked for it" because he should have known better than to mouth off to a cop is an implicit endorsement of the notion that cops are entitled to respect and cringing, obsequious obedience and, therefore, are justified in misusing the power entrusted to them if they don't get it. 

This is a minor episode.  It is a negligable, and lamentable, distraction from the most important and pressing issue of the day.  But the underlying principal is important.  At some point during the Reagan years, a lot of big-chilled boomers started dealing with their generational guilt over having called police officers just doing their very important and necessary jobs "pigs" and "fascists" by over-compensating.  In the 80s, a lot of them began trying to turn the notion that cops don't merely deserve respect, but rather are categorically entitled to it--merely by virtue of wearing the badge and irrespective of whether they individually deserve it--into a cultural norm. 

God forbid.  That attitude is unworthy of the citizens of a republic dedicated to the proposition that a person is entitled to his or her opinion.  It is one more step on the road that leads to a day when the microcosmic police states we've turned our airports into break out of the terminals and onto the streets of our cities.   

. . . in view of [CBO Director Doug Elmendorf's] statement [that, based on an incomplete analysis by CBO under rules that don't allow CBO to recognize savings ], there is much heavy lifting ahead. We support the efforts of the Finance Committee to produce a bipartisan bill, despite calls from both sides of the aisle to rush forward or delay indefinitely.  While we are committed to providing relief to American families as quickly as possible, we believe taking additional time to achieve a bipartisan result is critical for legislation that affects 17 percent of our economy and every indvidual in the U.S. 

We look forward to working with you to develop legislation that is vital to the well-being of the American people and urge you to resist timelines which prevent us from achieving the best results blah de blah de blah de blah.

July 17, 2009 letter by Slimey Six to Senate Democratic and Republican leadership (emphasis and blah de blahs added).   

 Brian Beutler has a more sophisticated analysis than mine of the motives and actions of the Slimey Six and wisely recommends following Obama's perrenial advice not to get caught up in the breathless news cycle and "turn every microdevelopment into a make or break moment for progressive change"  That's usually my line, indeed my creed.  Hell, I'm even one of the people who kind of rolls his eyes at the word "progressive."  I doubt that these self-important asshats are going to be able to slow down progress. 

But, seriously, the problem is equally on both sides of the aisle?  "bipartisan bill?"  "Bipartisan result?"  Who the hell do they think they're fooling?  They're in the damn Senate.  They know the score.  There isn't going to be any "bipartisan solution."  The Republicans only objective is to kill it.   We know it.  Reid knows it.  Obama knows it.  It is absofrakkinglutely impossible that the Slimey Six don't it because, they're in the goddam Senate.  The mere fact that they sent this letter to McConnell as if he or anyone in his rotting animated corpse of a party have ever, at any point, had the slightest intention of allowing health reform to happen is intself an insult to the intelligence of anyone with half a brain who's been even half-assedly  following this issue.   (A description which, unfortunately, excludes Wolf Blitzer and most of the Beltway MSM). 

So what are the Slimey Six doing this and why today?  Whose side are they on and whose agenda are they serving? 

Well, by the most remarkable coincidence, on the same day the Slimesters sent their letter to Reid and McConnell, good ol' Sen. Jim DeMint made the answer to that question perfectly clear.  Today, DeMint frankly explained how delaying a vote on health care reform until after the August recess is crucial to their plan to both stop health care reform and "break" Obama:

Conservative leaders will push delay any vote on health care reform until after the August recess to capitalize on what they say is a growing tide of opposition to reform measures, they said on a conference call with "tea party" participants today.

"I can almost guarantee you this thing won't pass before August, and if we can hold it back until we go home for a month's break in August," members of Congress will hear from "outraged" constituents, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint said on the call, which was organized by the group Conservatives for Patients Rights.

"Senators and Congressmen will come back in September afraid to vote against the American people," DeMint predicted, adding that "this health care issue Is D-Day for freedom in America."

"If we're able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him," he said.

The founder of Conservatives for Patients Rights told the 104 participants in the call, which was organized to coincide with the National Tea Party Patriots group's protests at the offices of members of Congress today, that polling suggests majorities oppose a "government take-over," which is how Scott's group casts the Obama plan.

Rep. Mike Pence, also on the call, also said the tide is turning.

"Every single day more dems are expressing op to government-run health care," he said.

Ben Smith's Politico blog, 7/17/09, 12:31 pm (bold facing and italics added, hyperlinks in original.) 

(Parenthetically, being a Politico tool, Ben, of course, didn't feel the need to note that "Conservatives for Patient Rights" is an astroturf front group funded by the guy who founded HCA and ran it until he was outsted in the wake of a multi-million dollar Medicare fraud scandal and set up by the same folks behind the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth.)   

So whose agenda are the Slimey Six serving?  Whose side are they on?  Do the math.  It's easy as 2+2.   

And that's my insight for the day.  The Slimey Six may not be able to affect the timetable and their letter today may be yet another futile corrupt Blue Dog fart in a hurricane, but it crystalized for me that the time has come when sides must be chosen.  DeMint, although completely insane, made both the stakes and the opposition's strategy clear.  Delay health care until after the August recess.  Harness the the teabaggers and the rest of the astroturf battlebots that the sociopathic insurance industry flacks have been buying since the mid-90s  to generate some phony constituient traffic to the offices of selected congressmen or senators from purple states or districts.  Upon receipt of these missives, these congressmen will lose bladder control, ignore the polls showing public approval for a public option remains highand vote to kill the public option and, if they're really scared, the whole bill.  Health reform dies, Obama's political capital is gutted oh, P.S. and by the way, so is the entire liberal agenda . 

Grandiose?  Yep.  Delusional?  Maybe, but we dare not take the risk. 

As former CIGNA PR executive Wendall Potter made clear, the insurance companies have been preparing for this fight since they killed the Clinton reform effort. (Yes, I linked twice.  His interview with Amy Goodman is, in my view, even more important than his Senate testimony  last month.)  In close coordination with their allies in the GOP and conservative media, they are preparing to spend tens of millions of dollars if they can delay a vote until after the August recess.  They want to take advantage of the traditional August MSM Mind Meltdown--the "dog days" period when the cable asshats' brains traditionally turn into liquid shit and ooze out of their ears--to pump so much Luntz-approved disinformation into the air that people get scared and scream for their Congresscritter to save them from the socialists.  And, of course, there will be sockpuppets aplenty on the blog comments (they're already showing up at TPM, did you notice?) and lots and lots of oh so very sincere letters to the editors in the eighteen surviving local newspapers in America. 

And that brings me to my real message tonight, which I offer in the hope that those to whom it is directed will at least give it a little consideration before they rush into the comments to call me a dissent-suppressing jackbooted fascist or a fawning Obama cultist. 

There are still a lot of folks on the left of the ideological bellcurve who are adament about the need for a single player plan or who are otherwise upset with one provision or another in one or another of the bills that they deem "sellouts."  More power to you. If we didn't have all this pesky political, social and historical reality to deal with, I'd be over there with you.  As it happens, we do and, as Howard Dean noted tonight on Democracy Now, whether the continuation of private insurance with regulation and a public option it is the best, most economically efficient or socially desirable plan is quite irrelevant.

Yeah, look, I don't position myself against single payer, but I position myself for giving the American people a choice. I think what the President understands is the country is a conservative country with a small "c." That is, they want change, but like most human beings, they don't want so much that they're uncomfortable. And so, the genius of the Obama healthcare plan is it's not the healthcare plan that an academic would write in the ivory tower, but it starts from where we are, not where we would have been

* * *

The thing I love about Obama's plan is it's politically practical. Instead of saying, "This is the right thing to do," as Dr. Young said, "and this is what we're going to do," he says, "Look, you decide for yourself. We're going to give you an example. We're going to allow people under sixty-five to sign up for what people over sixty-five have. And you make the choice." And what we're all betting is that the private--and I agree with his comments about the private insurance industry. Their behavior has been reprehensible, cutting people off when they have illnesses and charging huge--executive salaries of the big three are over $20 million. The guy that runs CMS, which has a billion claims a year, probably makes $150,000 or $200,000. I mean, it's ridiculous. Let the American people choose. If they make the choice themselves, they will invest emotionally in this system, and I think that the insurance industry will be forced to behave in a much better way, or they will be put out of business. But it will be themselves that's putting themselves out of business, and the American people, not the Congress, doing it.

I highly recommend this broadcast and encourage everyone to listen to it or read the transcript at the link above.  I found Dean's argument tonight to be the most pursuasive one in favor of the way they're trying to do this than any I've heard yet.  He talked me past my own real ambivelence and onto the bandwagon in a way that no one else had managed to do before.  

But DeMint's "Waterloo" statement is what really made me commit.  He's the one who conviced me that, though it makes me gag a little say something so Shrubby, we have arrived at one of those rare moments when the knuckleheaded platitude is true: if you're not with us, you're with them--with DeMint and CIGNA and Luntz. This is the with us or against us moment and its not just healthcare that's at stake.  The Republicans have gathered themselves for this one last counterattack against our agenda--to the extent we can quit squabbling and agree on what that might be.  If they win this, not just healthcare but everything we hope to accomplish over the next decade could set it back for years, or even another generation. 

Conversely, however, if we win this, we break them.  Once and for all.  Or at least for a long, long time. 

So I'm not calling on anyone who's passionate about single payer to STFU and and get on board for the big public option win.  Quite the contrary.  Your pressure is indispensible.  If, by some miracle, you get enough of the public on your side to win the debate, I'll cheer. Even if you don't win, however, the pull you are generating from the left is essential to counter the black hole to the right that's trying to suck reform into annhilation.    

However, if you're in the "no reform would be better than less reform than I demand" camp, you are. Jim DeMint's bitch.  Frustrating though you may find what you perceive as Obama's tepid incrementalism, he is doing something that is absolutely critical to the left's ability to implement its agenda--he is steadily pulling the center line of political opinion leftward.  Everytime he succeeds in accomplishing one of his tepid incrementalist goals with public support, formerly "leftist" ideas becomes mainstream opinion.  Help Jim DeMint kill reform and the mainstream backlashes rightward against the useless, chaotic Democrats. That's their plan.  For that reason alone, if you don't pick a side one will be chosen for you.  The Slimey Six have chosen.  Will you join them?