HCR Debate, the screenplay

Some truth in comedy, from Nicole Belle:

Democrats: "We need health care reform"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Give us a majority and we'll do it better"
Democrats: "Done, you have majority of both houses"

12 years later, health care is irrefutably worse in every respect for every single person in the United States

Democrats: "We need health care reform"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Americans are tired of partisan politics!"
Democrats: "OK, let's compromise"
Republicans: "OK, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done. Time to end debate"
Republicans: "Too liberal, we need more debate, we will filibuster to prevent you from voting"
Democrats: "OK, we'll vote--sorry guys, debate is ended. It's time to vote on the bill"
Republicans: "Too liberal, we vote no"
Democrats: "OK, it passed anyway--sorry guys."

One month later

Republicans: "Wait--wait, OK, we have less of a minority now so we can filibuster forever."
Democrats: "Sorry, the bill already passed, we need it to pass the House now"
Republicans: "But we have enough to filibuster"
Democrats: "Sorry, the bill already passed, we need it to pass the House now"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You haven't listened to our ideas! You've shut us out of this whole process!"
Democrats: "Sorry, show us your proposal"
Republicans: "Smaller government"
Democrats: "That's not very specific"
Republicans: "OK, here's our detailed proposal--It's our common-sense ideas we spent 12 years not enacting"
Democrats: "OK, we'll add a bunch more of your ideas"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You included all these back-room deals"
Democrats: "OK, we'll get rid of the back-room deals"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You're using obscure procedural tricks to eliminate the back-room deals!"
Democrats: "No, we're using reconciliation, which both parties have used dozens of times for much larger bills"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You're pressuring Congressmen to vote for your bill! Scandal!"
Democrats: "It's called 'whipping', it's been done since 1789"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Can't you see the American people don't want this?"
Democrats: "This bill is mildly unpopular (40-50%), doing nothing (your proposal) is extraordinarily unpopular (4-6%)"
Republicans: "We need to start over! We need to start over!"
Democrats: "We should really consider voting--"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Start over! Clean slate! Common-sense! America!"

Is it really about Health Care?

Frank Rich's opinion piece in today's NYT is a wonderful collection of the GOP Hysteria over the Health Care bill and a frightening comparison to the similar freakouts after passage of the New Deal, Medicare and Civil Rights laws.

To be sure, this bill nothing even remotely close to the budget atrocity the Palins and Boehners want to make it out to be, costing roughly $94B per year for the first ten years, revenue generation and other savings excluded.  In the grand scheme of the $1.3T deficit Bush handed to Obama by the end of 2009, it's a drop in the bucket.  But this isn't really about "government takeover" or "power grabbing" the way the RNC/FNC puppets want you to believe it is, but rather a frantic collective clawing at the floor while being dragged out of power.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

Frum, ctd.

Bartlett with a rather telling anecdote re: the Frum firing. 

I don't know all the details, but I presume that his Waterloo post on Sunday condemning Republicans for failing to work with Democrats on healthcare reform was the final straw.

Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already.

Purity tests at their ugliest...  

(via Sullivan)

Frum - One sensible voice on the right, ctd.

To the shock of, well, pretty much nobody, David Frum was pushed out of his post at the AEI on Wednesday.   Remember kids, if you come to the Republican table with sensible and realistic ideas and can see your party for exactly what they are, you can expect to be berated by the talking heads, the WSJ and ultimately shown the door. 

Three days after calling health-care reform a debacle for the Republicans, David Frum was forced out of his job at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday.

The ouster also came one day after a harsh Wall Street Journal editorial about the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, which said that he "now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans" and accused him of "peddling bad revisionist history."

Frum made clear in a letter to AEI President Arthur Brooks that his departure after seven years at the conservative think tank was not voluntary. "I have had many fruitful years at the American Enterprise Institute," he wrote, "and I do regret this abrupt and unexpected conclusion of our relationship." AEI did not comment immediately.

In a brief interview, Frum said "there was no suggestion by AEI" that his sharp criticism of the GOP's health-care strategy was the reason for his dismissal. He declined to say what Brooks had told him.
"They invited me to remain associated with AEI on a non-salaried basis," Frum said, and he declined.

No, It's really just rhetoric...

Urging your movement to violently mobilize against our elected leaders, that is.   Sarah Palin seems to have no problem doing so.   John McCain seems to have trouble... with condemning such behavior.   Has this whole world gone crazy?!   Yes it has, says Ezra Klein: 

I don't want to exaggerate the importance of the death threats being made against congressmen who voted for health-care reform. Nuts are nuts. But there is a danger to the sort of rhetoric the GOP has used over the past few months. When Rep. Devin Nunes begs his colleagues to say "no to socialism, no to totalitarianism and no to this bill"; when Glenn Beck says the bill "is the end of America as you know it"; when Sarah Palin says the bill has "death panels" -- that stuff matters.

And the stuff on talk radio, of course, was worse. So take the universe of people who really respect right-wing politicians and listen to right-wing media. Most of them will hear this stuff and turn against the bill. Some will hear this stuff and really be afraid of the bill. And then a small group will hear this stuff and believe it and wonder whether they need to do something more significant to stop this bill from becoming law. And then a couple will actually follow through. And one will cut the gas lines leading to house of Rep. Tom Perriello's brother after seeing a tea partyer post the address online.

(via Sullivan)

Getting warmer...

Via Slate: 

1.  Pope Implicated in Sex Abuse Scandal

The Catholic Church is in the middle of another sex abuse scandal, and this one keeps inching closer and closer to Pope Benedict XVI. As more lawsuits are filed, more documents that have been hidden from public view for years are making their way into the courts. It was revealed on Wednesday that when the pope was still known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he "failed to defrock an American priest who molested hundreds of deaf boys, despite receiving letters from a number of American bishops pleading with him to act on the matter," the Times reported. "Internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Ratzinger, warning him and other top Vatican officials that failure to act could embarrass the church, have been unearthed as part of a lawsuit." The Rev. Lawrence Murphy worked at St. John's School for the Deaf in Wisconsin from 1950 to 1974, during which time he molested up to 200 boys. (A social worker who evaluated the priest many years later said the reverend admitted to the molestations and exhibited no remorse.) Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican's secretary of state, was Ratzinger's second-in-command in the mid-'90s when U.S. bishops wrote about the situation surrounding Murphy. Bertone told the bishops to begin a canonical trial that would result in Murphy's defrocking if he was found guilty, but Ratzinger called it off after receiving a letter directly from Murphy. " 'I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,' Father Murphy wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, according to the Times. "'I ask your kind assistance in this matter.'" Instead of disciplining Father Murphy, the church moved him from the region but allowed him to continue working in schools and a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.

Frum - One Sensible Voice on the Right

David Frum follows up on his Waterloo column from yesterday and adds some credible ideas for the GOP going forward:

• Shifting the tax on high-end earners to another source of revenue; ie. carbon tax 
• Stop defending Employer-based care and embrace individual choice 
• Reduce regulation on the exchanges to promote more flexibility for the insurers to create affordable plans
• Move to end the small-business fines for payrolls of  > $500K, to promote competition among employers

These things, he says, are better alternatives to campaigning solely on the repeal of the measure as a whole.   He then goes on - brilliantly, I might add - to reprimand the conservative establishment for the vitriol and anger that has warped and negated any rational debate and discourse for the last 14 months: 

That platform is ambitious enough -- but also workable, enactable and likely to appeal to voters. After 18 months of overheated rhetoric, it's time at last for Republicans to get real.
I've been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes, it mobilizes supporters -- but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead.
Now the overheated talk is about to get worse. Over the past 48 hours, I've heard conservatives compare the House bill to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 -- a decisive step on the path to the Civil War. Conservatives have whipped themselves into spasms of outrage and despair that block all strategic thinking.

Maybe there's hope after all.