Right Wing Nut House

Liberals are licking their chops at the prospect of using the death of Ted Kennedy to unite the party and get a health care reform bill passed.

Is exploiting the death of Kennedy a rotten, shameless, despicable thing to do? In politics, nothing is rotten or shameless - unless you’re on the other side taking advantage of an obvious political gambit. The only consideration is if something works or not. And baby, the Dems are going to milk the death of Kennedy until they wring every last ounce of political capital they can manage from his rotund carcass.

They are going to bend every effort to tie the emotional attachment with the late senator sincerely felt by the vast majority of Democrats directly to the health care bill with the hope that it will give some of the Blue Dogs, and liberals the cover they need to come to an agreement. In short, using the memory of Kennedy and good feelings elicited when appealing to his ghost, the Democratic leadership hopes it makes party members more willing to compromise to achieve the goal of creating KennedyKare.

I would fully expect the Republicans to do the exact same thing in similar circumstances. Of course, that would be an impossibility at the moment since no Republican living, dead, or in between has that kind of pull with the party, nor is there an issue that Republicans could rally around even if such a mythical beast existed. The appeals to Reagan’s memory may engender fond feelings of nostalgia, but the wellspring of actual political power that the Ghost of the Gipper can wield is just about dry.

So the question isn’t should the Democrats exploit Kennedy’s death, but rather what is the best way to go about doing it to achieve success?

Renaming the bill in honor of Kennedy won’t do much. Nice symbolism but hardly enough to break, what most media reports have said, is a titanic log jam of proposals on reform where several committees and individuals are working at cross purposes. Getting a bill out of this mish mash is going to take a lot more than simply calling the monstrosity something else.

In order to rally the Congress, more substantive and public demonstrations of both real and manufactured emotionalism will have to be employed for the gambit to work. Kennedy is going to have to first be beautified, and then named as a civic saint - a party icon that can be invoked with such reverence that “What would Teddy want?” becomes a rallying cry for reform leaders.

It starts today with a “carefully orchestrated” procession from the Kennedy’s beloved Hyannis Port, through the streets of Boston where the political and emotional symbolism will fairly drip from old imitation gas streetlights in the city’s historic North End:

A procession will leave Hyannis Port at 1 p.m. today, accompanying Kennedy’s body to Boston for a final journey through a city indelibly marked by his family.

At about 2:15, the procession is expected to wind its way through downtown, first passing through the North End, where his mother was born, then crossing the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway on its way to the State House, and ultimately passing the Bowdoin Street residence of President Kennedy when he first ran for Congress and the federal building that bears his name.

Crowds are encouraged to gather on Hanover Street along the Greenway, on City Hall Plaza, and on the Boston Common in front of the State House.

The procession will end at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where Kennedy will lie in repose and visitors will be invited to pay their respects today and tomorrow.

There will be a massive outpouring of people who will want to view the remains, reminding members of Kennedy’s enormous popularity not only in the party, but with the average working American as well. TV images of the procession passing these Democratic touchstones will also serve to connect Ted to his martyred brothers thus making a direct appeal to generations of Democrats.

This is powerful stuff, and the news nets will milk coverage was well, seeing that events such as these will bring millions of eyeballs to their broadcasts who might not normally be watching.

Same thing happened when Reagan died, and for the same reasons. National tragedy is the honey that attracts millions of extra viewers and there’s no reason to complain about it.

There will apparently be no less than 3 memorial services; an invitation only event tomorrow night at the library (no word on whether it will be televised, although I can’t imagine it not). Then, the actual funeral mass at a Basilica on Mission Hill. Here, there will be “limited press access” which is probably short hand for pool reporting.

From there, more symbolism will be used as another procession will form, taking the casket to Logan Airport for the trip to Washington and a late afternoon burial at Arlington Cemetery.

President Obama is scheduled to give the eulogy on Saturday and will no doubt give it his usual best effort. How hard will he hit the meme of passing health care reform in Kennedy’s name? Hopefully, the guy isn’t completely tone deaf and will refrain from hammering the world wide audience over the head with references to it. However, it would be perfectly legitimate for Obama to specifically tout reform since Kennedy himself is quoted as saying the issue was central to his public life. Republicans will complain no matter what but the president must still strike a solemn balance between honoring Kennedy and taking care of politics.

A couple of interesting side notes. First, why no lying in state in the rotunda of the Capitol? It could be because they would then have to move the funeral mass to Washington, D.C. as protocol would dictate that any lying in state be conducted before the funeral rites. Plus, the funeral would have to be moved to a Sunday which, while permissible, is atypical in the Catholic church.

Secondly, there has been no announced Wellstone-style Congressional memorial service. It may not have been planned yet. Or, Democrats might be a little hesitant considering the grief they got following the tribute to Wellstone after his death from a plane crash in 2002.

Surely Al Franken is being disingenuous at best when he writes in HuffPo about that Wellstone tribute:

A pained Limbaugh asked his audience the day after the memorial: “Where was the grief? Where were the tears? Where was the memorial service? There wasn’t any of this!”

This was a lie. I was there. Along with everyone else, I cried, I laughed, I cheered. It was, to my mind, a beautiful four-hour memorial.

I didn’t boo. Neither did 22,800 of the some 23,000 people there. This has been a much discussed, much lied about aspect of the memorial. A number of Republicans, like Peggy Noonan and Weekly Standard writer Chris Caldwell claimed that 20,000 people had booed Trent Lott. (Caldwell claimed that 20,000 people booed a whole litany of people who weren’t booed at all.) We’ll never get an actual count - but I’d say about two hundred people booed Trent Lott when his face came on the Jumbotron. This was about a minute after 23,000 people cheered for Bill Clinton when his face appeared on the Jumbotron.

How does that square with an account from someone a little less partisan, William Saletan of Slate?

But the solemnity of death and the grace of Midwestern humor are overshadowed tonight by the angry piety of populism. Most of the event feels like a rally. The touching recollections are followed by sharply political speeches urging Wellstone’s supporters to channel their grief into electoral victory. The crowd repeatedly stands, stomps, and whoops. The roars escalate each time Walter Mondale, the former vice president who will replace Wellstone on the ballot, appears on the giant screens suspended above the stage. “Fritz! Fritz!” the assembly chants.

“Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning,” Wellstone declares in a videotaped speech shown on the overhead screens. “Politics is about improving people’s lives.” But as the evening’s speakers proceed, it becomes clear that to them, honoring Wellstone’s legacy is all about winning the election. Repeating the words of Wellstone’s son, the assembly shouts, “We will win! We will win!” Rick Kahn, a friend of Wellstone’s, urges everyone to “set aside the partisan bickering,” but in the next breath he challenges several Republican senators in attendance to “honor your friend” by helping to “win this election for Paul Wellstone.” What can he be thinking?

Franken is right. I watched the entire memorial service (I admired and liked Paul Wellstone even though I vehemently disagreed with him on almost everything he stood for.) It is true that 20,000 people did not boo Trent Lott. But unless those 200 phantom booers mentioned by Franken were right next to a microphone and had their numbers seem inflated, my guess would be more like 5,000 booed Lott, with even louder boos for Jesse Ventura, then governor. I seem to recall Denny Hastert also receiving a healthy round of boos but am not sure he was even there.

At any rate, Saletan’s description of the “Memorial Service” is spot on. Numerous speakers trashed Republicans - not just the two he mentioned. It could very well be that Franken - as rabid a partisan who has ever served in the senate - has an entirely different idea what partisan speechmaking is all about than normal people like you and me.

Whether it was planned to be a pep rally is not the point. That’s what it became and Democrats would do well to recall the reaction to press reports - including those bastions of right wing lying, the New York Times, and Time Magazine that led to at least a mini-backlash that could have cost Mondale the election.

But such an event might be a topper to what Democrats obviously hope will be an emotional outpouring in memory of Senator Kennedy which might translate into the political muscle necessary to ram through KennedyKare. In fact, one might expect the Democrats to try and stampede the issue into passing once Congress is back from their recess after Labor Day.

Would it work? The stampede, probably not. But I don’t see how the death of Ted Kennedy and the Democrat’s exploiting the emotional context of remembrance and history that will be on display, can do anything except help President Obama and the Congressional leadership realize some kind of health care bill before Thanksgiving.

It’s late August in the Heartland. Soon, surrounding my little town of Streator, Illinois, the farmers will begin the near frantic job of harvesting their crops, racing their giant combines down row upon row of impossibly bountiful fields of corn, soybeans, and other foodstuffs that will feed the nation, the world. This miracle is brought to us courtesy of science, mother nature, and the careful, patient husbandry of the American farmer. It takes equal parts hard work and an intimate knowledge of the land to make a living as a farmer in modern America. And these days, it also takes a keen business mind and an almost supernatural ability to judge the market to maximize the farmer’s razor thin margin of profit.

And it takes a little luck. We’ve had a farmer’s summer for growing that’s for sure. Rain has been plentiful. The weather has been mild, thus sparing those whose life is synced up with the rhythms of the seasons the burden of having to toil in the usual life draining heat and humidity that afflicts these parts during the summer months. No crop destroying floods. No plagues of locusts. Just the sun, the wind, the gentle rains, and nature’s mysterious magic that turns a tiny seed placed in the rich, loamy, middle American earth into the eye-popping bounty that is the envy of the modern world.

Indeed, in the entire history of civilization, dating back to the first attempts to cultivate wheat 10,000 years ago (probably in what is now Turkey), the world has never seen anything to compare to the productivity of the American farmer. Thanks to a happy marriage of science and experience, we grow more food, using less acreage, and in a wider variety of climates, soils, and landscape than any society that has trod earth.

And it all starts here, not 2 miles from where I’m sitting. We don’t think about it much, this wondrous process of bringing food to our tables. We walk into the grocery store and don’t think about the aisles and aisles of products that has as its origins someone’s hard labor. It rarely crosses our mind that each box of cereal, or head of lettuce, or tomato, or T-Bone steak has many hours of planning, feeding, growing, reaping, and processing being performed by real people before the fruit of that labor drops effortlessly into our carts.

Next time you’re in a supermarket, think about it. I daresay you will be filled with awe and gratitude that the few have worked so diligently to feed the many, and that appreciating what they accomplish year in and year out to literally keep us from starving is the least we can do to thank them.

Yes, it’s late summer and already, a cold dread is beginning to grip my heart as I realize that in a few short weeks, the lush verdancy of the growing season will be replaced by the slate grays and burnt umbers of Autumn. And where the fall has its own distinctive charm and beauty, I have begun to truly hate the winters here in the Midwest, which seem to be getting longer, colder, and darker the older I get.

I feel a kinship with my Celtic ancestors who also hated the winters. Unlike them, I know that spring will eventually get here. They, however, weren’t entirely sure and, just to be on the safe side, would sacrifice a cow during the festival of Samhain (November 1) to one or another of their deities so that the Gods would take pity on them and bring the spring back after a spell. I’m sure they were relieved as I am the first day that temps climb above 60 degrees.

Perhaps My Beloveds - the Chicago Bears - should make a sacrifice before the season gets underway. Just so they don’t mistake one of their defensive lineman for a cow.

And, of course, we are now officially in the stretch run of the baseball season. My White Sox have been so gloriously inconsistent this year that I haven’t even bothered to write about them. But here we are, 5 weeks from the end of the season and the Pale Hose find themselves just a couple of games out of first. Thankfully, other teams in their division have proven to be equally horrible so that the race for the Central Division crown will probably be decided that last week of the season when one team screws up less than the others and backs in to the title.

By then, I will be looking back on this moment with envy. By the time the season concludes, the night air will carry a sharp twitch of cold, you will probably be able to see your breath, a sweater will no longer be enough to keep you warm, and I will be bitching even more about the fact that winter is on the way. This is a prerogative of age, by the way, so I would appreciate it if you kept off my case about it.

After all, you might jinx the whole thing and spring might never make an appearance.

This outrageous dishonesty from MSNBC should have produced an outpouring of criticism from responsible media. Instead, the deliberate cropping of a picture of a man carrying a rifle and pistol outside of an Obama town hall just so the anchor and guests could rail against “white racism” in opposing health care reform — even though the uncropped photo shows the gun carrier to be a Black man — got me to thinking about how it would be possible to quantify the level of hatred directed against President Obama because of his race.

Unlike many of my liberal friends, the Good Lord has not vouchsafed me the ability to peer into the souls of my fellow man to discern the truth or purity of his motives. And it is devilishly difficult to make assumptions in this matter based on polling, or other less politically motivated criteria because invariably, people are ashamed (as well they should be) of harboring racist attitudes toward our chief executive. They will lie to pollsters, to their friends, even to themselves, I suppose. It makes gleaning the truth that much more difficult.

Then there is the problem with separating real anger and fear about health care reform from the very real feelings of fear and anger that a black man is president. Can a racist sincerely be against health care reform because of their political or ideological beliefs? Does it matter? What legitimacy, if any, should be granted that individual’s views?

Obama supporters aren’t helping matters by tarring and feathering anyone who looks sideways at the president as a racist. And those who deliberately employ the word as a smear to score political points are as bereft of character and despicably dishonest as any real racist who opposes them. Casually dropping the word “racist” in critiques of Obama opponents is getting quite tiresome, and those who thoughtlessly do so are contributing to the dilution of the word’s impact - an unintended consequence of the word’s overuse.

All of this is lost on many, if not most purveyors of the “Obama opponents are really closet Kluxers” narrative. There appears to be as much mindless caricature of the president’s adversaries as there is of the president himself. But if many on the left are too willing to see the absolute down and dirty worst in their opponents, it is equally true that we on the right are at a loss about how to police our own ranks in order to rid ourselves of those who express outrageous opinions that specifically refer to Obama’s skin color or cultural heritage.

No penalty accrues to those who will correct me in the comments by stating that the president is “only half black” or that he’s looking out for his “home boys” or any one of a dozen other racially charged memes that can be found in the comments on many conservative blogs. Most bloggers try and police their comment sections and remove the most objectionable attitudes.

But deleting the comments doesn’t delete the problem, and aside from talking and writing about it, I am at a loss as to how to separate the scum from those who legitimately, and for reasons of party or ideology, oppose what the president is trying to do.

Sniffing out obvious racism is one thing. Discerning it otherwise is well nigh impossible. In the end, referring to one’s political opponents as being motivated by race hatred is being applied far too broadly, and in too many cases, is done knowing full well that it simply isn’t true. This too, breeds no consequences and is, in fact, cheered on by many liberals who delight in piously wrapping themselves in the mantle of authority on matters relating to who is and who is not a racist. Of course, they’d never let politics intrude in making such weighty decisions now, would they?

While there is no objective way to count racists, we might extrapolate that racist attitudes are held by many of those who, despite all evidence, logic, reason, and facts to the contrary, believe that Barack Obama is not the legitimate president of the United States.

There have been a few polls that have tried to measure the birther phenomenon, none with an eye toward discerning racial attitudes. The Pew Poll measured attitudes toward media coverage of the birther story. While 39% of Republicans say they had not heard enough about the birther issue, I fail to see how it necessarily follows that 39% of the GOP believes Obama is illegitimate for racist reasons - especially since 30% of independents say the same thing. There can’t be that many racists in America. If there were, Obama would never have been elected.

More to the point, this Daily-Kos-Research 2000 poll asks simply if Barack Obama was born in the United States. The fact that 58% of Republicans answered either “no” or “not sure” is more reflective of racist attitudes. And while it is impossible to be specific, I don’t see how one can escape concluding that a potentially large subset of that 58% refuse to acknowledge Obama as president because he is a black man.

How large is found in a regional breakdown of that number. Fully 53% of southerners doubt (23% “no”, 30% “not sure”) Obama’s citizenship. That includes both parties, by the way, although the number of Democrats who do not believe or are not sure Obama is a citizen nationally is only 7%. It is logical, considering the small level of doubt in other regions of the country (upwards of 90% of all respondents in the rest of the country believe Obama is a citizen), it’s a good bet that most of the Democratic doubters are found in the south too.

(How reliable is a poll conducted by one of the most partisan liberal sites on the web? Research 2000 is a respected outfit and those professionals who have examined their methodology find little to complain about.)

Is it reasonable to apply historical attitudes toward race and logic to believe a good portion of those southerners harbor racist attitudes toward the president? I believe the very nature of the birther argument supports that theory.

No, not all birthers are racists. Probably not even a majority. But the level of fear and hatred directed against the president based on absolutely nothing except a wild conspiracy theory would have to point to some other element at work besides the belief that Obama was not born here or is not a “natural born citizen.” Again, reason would dictate that a sizable but unknown segment of these Obama opponents are indeed, motivated by their inability to accept a black man as president.

(To my southern friends, I would say that you cannot deny history - ancient or recent - and say it is a statistical fluke of some kind that so many of your fellow southerners disbelieve the president’s citizenship, while refusing to ascribe such thinking to racial reasons.)

Scattershot charges of racism against most, if not all Obama opponents is therefore demonstrably untrue. But there is also no denying that a significant portion of the southern GOP opposes the president based at least partly on his race.

Where does this leave us as far as my original question? Is there any way to determine what percentage of opposition to the president is based on the fact that he’s African American?

Broadly speaking, I think we can, although it will be to nobody’s satisfaction. Racism as a factor in opposing the president is certainly far less prevalent than Obama supporters would have us believe. And from what I’ve tried to show, it is more prevalent than what many in the Republican party are claiming or wish to believe.

Yes, I’ve made a hash of the issue. What do you expect when the subject is racism in America? Ultimately, those with the courage to examine their own motives in opposing or supporting the president, must come to their own conclusions. But being aware of the issue as it affects our politics, weighing the methods by which we fight for what we believe, and discerning our personal attitudes toward our first Black president, will at least make us conscious of the dynamite with which we play when injecting race into any argument we have with each other.

So the public option is not a “government takeover” of the health insurance industry? Ok, sure. I’ll buy that.

Except after reading this, you will realize that the eventual goal of the people pushing it is to establish a single payer system and the public option is nothing more than a Trojan Horse designed to make that system a reality:

As progressives mourn the likely death of a public insurance option in health care reform, it’s worthwhile to trace the history of exactly where this idea — a compromise itself — came from. The public option was part of a carefully thought out and deliberately funded effort to put all the pieces in place for health reform before the 2008 election — a brilliant experiment, but one that at this particular moment, looks like it might turn out badly. (Which is not the same as saying it was a mistake.)

One key player was Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America’s Future. Hickey took UC Berkley health care expert Jacob Hacker’s idea for “a new public insurance pool modeled after Medicare” and went around to the community of single-payer advocates, making the case that this limited “public option” was the best they could hope for. Ideally, it would someday magically turn into single-payer. And then Hickey went to all the presidential candidates, acknowledging that politically, they couldn’t support single-payer, but that the “public option” would attract a real progressive constituency.

This little history lesson by Mark Schmitt is instructive. Most liberals know that advocating a single payer system would be political death for reform because, despite everything they are putting out about private health insurers, a huge majority of Americans are satisfied with the insurance they have and don’t want that to change. A whopping 83% of Americans believe the quality of health care they receive is “excellent” or “good” according to this Gallup poll from last December. And 67% believe their health care insurance is also “excellent” or “good.”

Even a Democratic pollster admits that people are “satisfied” with their coverage:

Satisfied’ means they like their doctor and have insurance to go to that doctor,” said Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster. “Maybe they think their policy is better than what most people have. But it doesn’t mean they don’t want reform.”

I agree. I want reform too. But establishing a system that is deliberately designed to eventually replace private insurance with a single payer government program would never fly in a million years in this country and the left knows it. Hence, the lies about the public option.

One of the major proponents of a single payer system, Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America’s Future, sold the idea of the public option to Obama and the other Democratic candidates last year:

The good news is that people are ready for big change. But the hard reality, from the point of view of all of us who understand the efficiency and simplicity of a single-payer system, is that our pollsters unanimously tell us that large numbers of Americans are not willing to give up the good private insurance they now have in order to be put into one big health plan run by the government.

Pollster Celinda Lake looked at public backing for a single-payer plan - and then compared it with an approach that offers a choice between highly regulated private insurance and a public plan like Medicare. This alternative, called “guaranteed choice” wins 64 percent support to 22 percent for single-payer. And even the hard core progressive part of the population, which Celinda calls the “health justice” constituency, favors “guaranteed choice” over single-payer. …

So the public option is not a slippery slope at all; it’s simply a lie invented to try and fool the American people into accepting “reform.”

Schmitt calls it “stealth single payer:”

But the downside is that the political process turns out to be as resistant to stealth single-payer as it is to plain-old single-payer. If there is a public plan, it certainly won’t be the kind of deal that could “become the dominant player.” So now this energetic, well-funded group of progressives is fired up to defend something fairly complex and not necessarily essential to health reform. (Or, put another way, there are plenty of bad versions of a public plan.) The symbolic intensity is hard for others to understand. But the intensity is understandable if you recognize that this is what they gave up single-payer for, so they want to win at least that much.

I had given Obama and the left the benefit of the doubt when ascribing a “slippery slope” to the idea that the public option would eventually crowd out private insurance in favor of a single payer government run system. In retrospect, I was too generous in granting them the inability to see the end result of their creation. It turns out, they knew full well where the public option would lead and simply lied about not believing that the public option would perform as they obviously hoped it would.

Professor Bainbridge:

What’s interesting is that so many on the left are willing to make what appears to be an admission against interest, but perhaps they feel it is needed to keep their less insightful troops in line.

It’s also why those of us who worry about slippery slopes want to see Obamacare killed in the womb.

I’ve been trying to think of anything comparable that has ever been attempted by conservatives - where they knew that what they wanted to accomplish was politically impossible and deliberately substituted an intermediate process that would eventually achieve what they wished, all the while denying that the slippery slope outlined by opponents would come to pass. Perhaps there has been abortion legislation designed to eventually outlaw the procedure. I’m sure there have been others. After all, there is nothing new in politics and the chances are very good that both sides have tried something like this before.

But I have never seen what Bainbridge calls this “admission against interest” so blatantly played out in such a public way. I think it shows that many on the left simply don’t care anymore about public opinion, and perhaps they’re right. Why should they when they’ve got such enormous majorities in the legislature, a president who believes most of what they believe, and an incurious media that refuses to call them out for such prevarication?

No, this isn’t exactly what I promised yesterday about what kinds of health reform I would support. This is a bare bones outline I did for AIP.

A sample:

So yes, we must reform the health care system. But let’s imagine for a moment that President Obama and the Democrats didn’t hate the free market so much and were willing to look at alternatives to what they are proposing that would mean less, not more government control, and allow the free market to do the heavy lifting in helping to bring down health care costs.

It’s not like there aren’t free market ideas out there to reform health care - despite what our president and the Democrats want you to believe. They are attempting to ram this health care reform package through the Congress while saying that their opponents have no new ideas to solve the same problems.

But covering the uninsured by making insurance affordable for all, covering those with pre-existing conditions, bringing down the cost of health care, and assuring that the patient, in consultation with his doctor, has the most control over his own treatment are goals that can be achieved more cheaply, and by using a mostly free market approach to reform.

Unfortunately, a completely market oriented solution is not politically viable or realistic at this time. More than six dollars in every ten we spend on health care in America is spent by government. Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans benefits, Indian health care, active duty military care, and the children’s insurance program S-CHIP are just a few of the programs that have skewed the market in health insurance and health care so that a purely free market solution is not in the cards. And doing away with these government programs - even if it were possible - would not be the answer.

But believe me, we can do better than what the president and the Democrats are proposing.

I then give a rudimentary primer on some of the alternatives.

As I said, it’s not very detailed and there are other reforms I would support. Unfortunately, I lost my internet this morning and it just came on about an hour ago so those who might be interested in what real health care reform might look like - from my humble point of view anyway - are going to have to wait at least another day.

Great discussion with my good friends Ed Morrissey and Rich Baehr last night on my radio show about what’s happening with the politics of health care. Rich, who has been a medical insurance consultant for more than a quarter century, sees a senior citizen backlash coming against the Dems. While Obama and the Democrats concentrate on convincing the middle class about the necessity of health care reform, the seniors are packing town hall meetings and expressing their outrage at the more than $350 billion in Medicare cuts. This will mean longer waits for care, doctors dropping medicare patients altogether, and generally lower levels of service.

Old people, Rich reminded us, vote - big time.

You can access a podcast of the show here.

I think very soon, the Democrats are going to have to decide whether to batten down the hatches and pass their idea of a health care bill, even in the teeth of some serious opposition. Or whether they should scrap what they have and start over with a whole new, much more modest approach. I don’t think they can get to “Plan B” from where they are now. They would have to construct an entirely new framework from which to begin.

It is not likely to happen unless support for their kind of reform hits the low 20’s in the polls. Right now, it’s in the mid-30’s to low 40’s which is bad but not political Armageddon. But support is not rising, it is falling. And the longer they dawdle in Congress, the more the opposition can muster its forces to defeat them.

Right now, I’d put passage of some kind of reform at 60-40 in favor. The only reason it’s that high is that Obama has yet to bring the full force and effect of his office into the debate. A president has enormous power and Obama has several hole cards yet to play. Town halls and speeches won’t get it done. He will have to do what LBJ used to call “the laying on of the hands.” For example, Congress may hold the purse strings but the president has enormous latitude about when those monies can be released. A road project in a member’s district may be held up (or expedited) depending on how that Congressman intends to vote. No matter how bad a member might think the public option to be, that kind of persuasion can work miracles.

If they ditch the public option, that 60-40 number goes up considerably. In the end, that’s what Obama might have to do to get something he can sign.

Getting a lot of love in the comments from my post yesterday about Palin, the Democrats, and everyone else demagoguing the health care reform issue to death.

To wit:

1. It’s not enough that I think the bill is horrible, bad, a catastrophe, and a threat to individual liberty. I must also get hysterical about it. I must go over the edge of sanity and reason because if I don’t, it’s obvious I am a liberal and an Obama lover. I must extrapolate the most dire, sinister outcomes assumed in the debate with no evidence whatsoever that anything being proposed will lead to “death panels,” or denial of critical care. I agree, and have written previously, there are slippery slopes aplenty in what is being proposed. But the kind of over the top, exaggerated, hysterically fearful claptrap being thrown around by some conservatives is illogical, and in the end, only makes our side look like losers

(Note: Emanuel’s brother is not writing the bill, nor is Holdren going to have anything to do with running any state controlled health care system. For the reasons so many of you outlined, it is extremely doubtful that senate confirmation would be forthcoming for either gentleman if Obama was dumb enough to try and appoint them to any position of influence in his Brave New State Run Health Care Agency.)

2. Saying anything negative about Sarah Palin brings out the creepiest conservatives on the web. The parallels between Obamabots and Palin zombies is disheartening, and makes me wonder what would happen if she did indeed run in 2012. Both are blinded by the notion that their white knight can do no wrong, and say no evil. Both Obamabots and Palin zombies see qualities in their heroes that don’t exist. Both believe their saviors are rescuing them from evil. Both are pathetic manifestations of the times in which we live and reflect the depths to which the American character has sunk. When so many on both sides of the great political divide imbue a politician with almost superhuman qualities, I fear for the future of the republic.

3. People who bring my family into any criticism of me are cretinous louts.

4. I am the last, sane person in America.

Isaac Asimov’s brilliant, and influential short story Nightfall comes to mind as a metaphor for this debate. The sci-fi classic is about a planet that is bathed in continual sunlight due to the fact that it revolves around 6 suns. It is a world that knows no darkness, no sundown, and no stars.

Every 2000 years or so, all six suns go into eclipse and for a brief period, there is night. A cult that predicted this catastrophe, and scientists who studied the remnants of past civilizations on the planet, concluded that when the darkness descends, everyone goes stark raving mad because the night is so frightening, they destroy their own civilization by setting fire to anything that burns in order to bring back the light.

(The final scene is one of the most haunting in all of sci-fi literature. After the darkness has descended, the scientists, who are trying to measure the phenomenon - including getting pictures of the mythical “stars” that they don’t really believe exist - are in for a surprise. The protagonist goes to a window:

Through it shone the Stars!

Not Earth’s feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye; Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.

Theremon staggered to his feet, his throat, constricting him to breathlessness, all the muscles of his body writhing in an intensity of terror and sheer fear beyond bearing. He was going mad and knew it, and somewhere deep inside a bit of sanity was screaming, struggling to fight off the hopeless flood of black terror. It was very horrible to go mad and know that you were going mad — to know that in a little minute you would be here physically and yet all the real essence would be dead and drowned in the black madness. For this was the Dark — the Dark and the Cold and the Doom. The bright walls of the universe were shattered and their awful black fragments were falling down to crush and squeeze and obliterate him.

In America, the darkness is descending and torches are being lit. Fear stalks the land - fear of the unknown, fear of our fellow citizens, fear of our political leaders, fear of the future. This fear is being stoked on both sides by people who are well aware of the consequences of what they are doing, but continue to fan the flames of dread because it gives them power and influence, or furthers their political designs. Reason has left the building. It has been replaced by a raw emotionalism that feeds upon itself, spiraling out of control, threatening violence and disorder while making any rational debate about health care reform impossible.

President Obama may get his statist, ruinously expensive, ridiculously complicated health care reform. But it will be a Pyrrhic victory. For in pulling out all the stops to garner a political triumph, and becoming the number one enabler of demagoguery and fear mongering, he will have so riven the citizenry of this republic as to make any future efforts to solve our problems in a bi-partisan manner an impossibility.

I am one of those who would have supported reasonable reforms in health insurance and realistic means to bring down health care costs. The Democrats are proposing neither, and are ginning up fear and outrage - as are Republicans in opposition - to ram down the throats of the American people, without legitimate debate or discussion reforms that are antithetical to the American character and the American way of doing things. The proposals make a mockery of our First Principles, and threaten not to “remake” America” but to fundamentally alter the compact between citizens and the government.

Without congressional hearings, or any input from opponents; in secrecy, and using complexity as a beard to hide an agenda that they know full well would be rejected by the overwhelming majority of citizens, the Democrats are in full on attack mode. They are not defending what they want to accomplish with reform. They are simply going after those who oppose them, using the most vile and despicable tactics to delegitimize the opposition.

Judging by the polls, it’s not working. And if health care reform fails, it won’t be because of the hysterical fear mongering by Republicans and conservatives, but because they didn’t believe in reform enough to trust the legislative process and the give and take of democratic debate.

I wholeheartedly agree that this statement by Sarah Palin on her Facebook page is unconscionable, outrageous, and either a deliberate lie, or proof that she really is an airhead:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

You’re absolutely right, governor. That kind of a system would indeed be “downright evil.”

Except, there is nothing in any proposal by any Democrat, Republican, Greenie, Communist, New Nazi, or a Flat Earther on health care that even hints about a “death panel.” You’re just making stuff up.

In fact, it’s hard to know just what the hell you’re referring to. Are you talking about the now dead proposal for a Medicare commission to decide treatment options for diseases (not people)?

Most of the White House session focused on slowing the rapid growth in health care costs, lawmakers said afterward. That discussion centered on a White House proposal to empower an outside body, like the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, to make binding recommendations for cost cuts in government-run health care programs. Waxman and others previously opposed the idea, but the chairman made a verbal agreement to work with the seven Blue Dogs on his committee to break through an impasse that has stalled consideration of the enormous bill.

Sorry, but you’re a little out of the loop up there in Mooseland. The proposal was rejected within hours of the agreement.

Other than that, I can’t for the life of me, think of what you are talking about. Now it may be that you’ve seen something in one of the proposals making the rounds in Washington - a proposal that actually does have a “death panel” in it - or something that will do the same thing. If so, please share it with us. I would like to know who wants to turn America into ancient Sparta where the elders would examine all newborns and, if the child was found to be weak or otherwise flawed in their eyes, they would toss the screaming infant over a cliff.

I’m just wondering why you chose to spread this nonsensical information about health care reform. The damn bill is plenty bad enough without lying about it. Jesus Christ! Your loyal subjects, who don’t think you can do any wrong, are smart enough to figure that out without you having to demagogue the issue like a Democrat, for God’s sake!

We have entered a phase in the “debate” over health care where the two sides can’t lie enough about the other’s motives, intentions, and ancestry. One would think that resurrecting Winston Churchill was in order, there are so many Nazis to fight. Both sides have been flinging the “N” word (”Nazi”) around like a monkey in a zoo tossing his feces at the gawkers. Pelosi, the DNC, a few tea partiers, and even a stray GOP lawmaker or two have used the word “Nazi” to describe their political opponents lately.

Just curious, but don’t my friends on the left tire of such out of control exaggeration? Calling protestors against a massive expansion of government - the biggest in American history - “racists” and “Nazis” must get awfully tiring as you try and stretch, and stretch, and stretch your justification for doing so beyond the bounds of reason, of logic, and of reality.

Dan Boaz on the “racist” protestors meme picked up by Paul Krugman and others who believe opposition to statism is a sign of racism:

The classical liberal ideas of individualism, individual rights, property rights, “negative liberties,” and limited government date back hundreds, even thousands, of years. They find their roots in the Greek and Hebrew conceptions of the higher law, the Scholastic thinkers, the Levellers’ ideas of self-ownership and natural rights, the political theory of John Locke, the economic analysis of Adam Smith, and the political institutions of the American Founding. To suggest that the case for freedom and limited government — or the application of that theory to contemporary proposals for the expansion of government — must be attributable to racism is uncharitable, ahistorical, thoughtless, and indeed contemptible.

It cannot be the case that every parody of a president who happens to be black is racist. And it is not good for democracy to try to counter every opposing argument with such a blood libel. The good news for advocates of limited government is that our opponents are displaying a striking lack of confidence in the actual arguments for their proposals. If they thought they could win a debate on nationalizing health care, or running trillion-dollar deficits, they wouldn’t need to reach for such smears.

Sorry, people have tuned that sort of nonsense out or don’t believe it any more. There’s such a thing as going to the well once to often with a political ploy and the Democrats with their “racism” and “Nazi” charges against the GOP and the protestors are discovering that now. This issue is too vital to use cheap political tricks like that.

I might say in a similar fashion, that some conservatives - talk radio, anti-health care lobbyists, and others who should know better - are spreading idiotic bull like Palin’s “death panels” all over the place.

As I said before, this monstrosity of a bill is bad enough. Why exaggerate? Why put out false information? It scares the bejeebies out of me and I’m not even listening to you. Surely we can have a debate on this without calling each other Nazis or racists, or trying to scare the old folks with talks of euthanasia, or “death panels.”

In fact, I would say that this is the primary reason that everyone has gone stark, raving mad over health care reform. There is no debate. There is no back and forth. There have been few hearings, less input from opponents, and absolutely no leadership from Obama on this issue.

And what “leadership” we have seen from this pretend president, has been his refusal to consider the fact that there are indeed, alternatives to what he is proposing, that there are other ideas out there that would accomplish as much or more of what he is proposing, and that telling the opposition to shut up is about the absolute, most incompetent, unthinking, radical, idiotic thing I have ever heard a president say in the midst of a political war.

Just a little comparison:

“I think the president welcomes the fact that we are a democracy and people in the United States, unlike Iraq, are free to protest and to make their case known.” (White House statement on anti-war protestors, 2002).

“I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess.” (Obama on health care protestors, yesterday).

My views on Bush are known to any who have read this site for a while, but I ask you; who’s the statesman and who’s the political putz?

Demagogues to the left, demagogues to the right, demagogues in the White House, The Hill, and all the way out in Alaska.

The republic appears to gone off the deep end. Pity we have the wrong man in the White House to fix it.

Action and reaction.

Obama comes up with ruinously expensive, statist, enormously complex, and ultimately ridiculous health care reform ideas - a bill that will change people’s lives in the most intimate way imaginable - and some people react to both the bill itself and the misinformation being spread by opponents by fearfully shouting down proponents of the measure and even threatening to get physical.

The Democrats react by bussing in labor thugs for “protection” while the White House encourages Democrats to hit back “twice as hard.”

Gee - and we’re surprised that violence breaks out?

In an age when reasonableness in politics is seen as weakness, or insufficient passion for “the cause,” coming to blows over health care was predictable Someone or many someones are going to get killed over this if it keeps up and the finger of blame will have a hard time finding a permanent place to rest.

I would dearly love to point the finger at President Obama and the Democrats as they have ratcheted up the potential for violence by bringing in supporters who have a 100 year history of goonishness when dealing with opponents. I’m talking about labor unions, of course, and the kinds of “activists” who will be showing up at these town halls. These are men who play for keeps and pull no punches when they feel their interests are on the line.

You might have had some sympathy for these tactics 70 or 80 years ago when employers routinely hired their own goons (and had the police on their side) to beat and kill organizers. But those days are long gone, even though the goons remain.

I have second hand familiarity with labor thugs, having worked in the early 80’s for an open shop construction trade association where our members who refused to use union labor were routinely beaten, harassed, their homes firebombed, and their jobsites vandalized. Of course, there are dozens of contemporary examples of workers who choose to cross a picket line being beaten - and worse. The heroes in the labor movement are all dead and long gone. Today’s unions are little better than extortion rackets, designed to milk both workers and employers for every nickle they can get out of them.

Labor officials then take that money and buy political power with it to maintain their lofty position (and lavish lifestyles) by getting their friends in Congress to protect them from audits, and as will be the case with card check, make it easier to get even more members to buy them more political power.

I don’t know for sure if labor bullies were responsible for beating up a couple of conservatives in St. Louis yesterday but I have my suspicions. I’ve seen it too often not to believe that it not only is possible, but likely as well.

But let’s return to the culprits who are also responsible for the violence last night and will be equally responsible as well for any future violence. The behavior of some conservative activists has been despicable. I am sick to death of hearing that shouting down opponents or physically threatening people who disagree with you is “understandable” because, after all, health care reform is so bad, you can’t blame people for being angry.

You bet your ass I blame people for shouting down and trying to intimidate their political opponents. We were given a brain at birth capable of reason and logic. We are not beasts who are unable to control our emotions. We were born in a country where only by civil debate and reasoned discourse have we been able to maintain our unity in the face of towering obstacles. Citizens coming from a hundred different backgrounds as well as representing every race, every creed, every ethnic group in the world do not naturally mix and form a society. We have to work at it. And that means governing our passions so that all may participate in the democratic process equally.

When we don’t - when we give in to these beastly impulses - we get 600,000 dead and one part of the country in ruins. Ultimately, the Civil War was as much about our failure to believe in the good intentions of our political opponents as it was about the union, or slavery. War is never “inevitable.” Losing faith in each other was what led to the explosion.

To give in to the desire to express anger while preventing others from making their views known demonstrates an adolescent level of emotional maturity. It is rude, selfish, and ultimately self defeating (as I wrote about here several days ago).

Look at Rasmussen’s latest poll that show a significant bump in the president’s numbers from people who “strongly approve” of him, from 28% to 34% in less than a week. A reasonable explanation is that those fence sitters who were becoming lukewarm about Obama have been energized by conservative misbehavior at town halls. That 6 point bump cannot be explained by a glitch in the numbers. It is statistically significant enough that it had to have been driven by what’s been in the news.

Those who can’t control themselves should stay home. It’s that simple. If you are unable to allow your fellow citizens the same rights given to you and refrain from shouting them down, I suggest you attend a professional wrestling match where you can shout down people who disagree with you without doing any harm. By showing up at town halls and claiming that you are so angry that, like a 15 year old boy, you can’t control your emotions, you only make passage of health care reform more likely.

It is the Democrats and liberals who have taken this to the next level, however, by urging their supporters to “hit back twice as hard” and by bringing in professional union agitators. And Democratic congressmen aren’t helping matters either by trying to prevent protestors from attending the town halls. Now conservatives feel they have to top what the Democrats have just done, and the cycle is likely to escalate out of control.

Action and reaction. In the end, no one remembers who started it.

This is one of the most dishonest, despicable things I’ve ever seen in politics. TPM and Think Progress published a purported “smoking gun” memo from an anti-health reform group that they were pushing as a blueprint for action that protestors at town hall meetings were following to disrupt the proceedings.

There’s only one problem: The group that is responsible for writing the memo are a bunch of bush leaguers with no more influence than my pet cat Aramas on demonstrators protesting anything:

When the “manufactured” outrage the Left is trying to demonize lines up so inconveniently with public polling, it’s sometimes necessary to create evidence for the “manufactured” storyline.

Enter Think Progress, which unearthed this shocking, secret memo from the leader of a small grassroots conservative organization in Connecticut, which allegedly instructs members on “infiltrating town halls and harassing Democratic members of Congress.”

Right Principles PAC was formed by Bob MacGuffie and four friends in 2008, and has taken in a whopping $5,017 and disbursed $1,777, according to its FEC filing.

“We’re just trying to shake this state up and make a difference up here,” MacGuffie told me during a telephone interview. He’s surprised at his elevation to national rabble-rouser by the Left.

Right Principles has a Facebook group with 23 members and a Twitter account with five followers. MacGuffie describes himself as an “opponent of leftist thinking in America,” and told me he’s “never pulled a lever” for a Republican or Democrat on a federal level. Yet this Connecticut libertarian’s influence over a national, orchestrated Republican health-care push-back is strong, indeed, if you listen to liberal pundits and the Democratic National Committee, who have crafted a nefarious web out of refutable evidence.

Think Progress highlighted his memo’s directives to “‘Yell,’ ‘Stand Up And Shout Out,’ ‘Rattle Him’,” calling it a “right-wing harassment strategy against Dems.” The blog falsely connected MacGuffie to the national conservative group FreedomWorks through the most tenuous of threads. The Think Progress link that purports to establish MacGuffie as a FreedomWorks “volunteer” leads to his one blog posting on a Tea Party website (on the free social networking site, ning.com). Think Progress calls Tea Party Patriots a “FreedomWorks website.”

The problem is it’s not a FreedomWorks site, according to FreedomWorks spokesman Adam Brandon. FreedomWorks is a “coalition partner” of TeaPartyPatriots.org, but does not fund the site in any way.

“There is no formal structural connection,” Brandon told me. “Never has been. Never will be. We’re just fellow travelers in the movement.”

There is no “memo” that tells protestors what to do. If anyone else besides this guys mother, grandmother, and maiden aunt saw this “blueprint” I would be enormously surprised. It was a wholly manufactured piece of “evidence” - along with the ridiculously tenuous connections - by TPM.

Josh Marshall bragged to high heaven about the George Polk Award for journalism he received. I am going to write the award committee and ask them to rescind it. This isn’t even yellow journalism. It is propaganda, as Marshall and the rest of the left (who are, in fact, the ones who receive instructions on a daily basis about how to frame issues through their exclusive email list) can’t be bothered with the facts, can’t be bothered with the truth, and are only concerned about demonstrating their rank partisanship and shocking demagoguery.

Of course, it is impossible for the truth to catch up to the lies at this point. We will see the left pointing to this ridiculous memo for the duration of the health care reform debate as “evidence” that the outrage is “manufactured” and not genuine. Nor will the media take the time or make the effort to differentiate between the vast majority of demonstrators who are locally organized and the few agitators who have come in from out of town. Ignorance of the nature of the protests and who is taking part extends to the White House, as this email I got proves:

There’s been a lot of media coverage about organized mobs intimidating lawmakers, disrupting town halls, and silencing real discussion about the need for real health insurance reform.

The truth is, it’s a sham. These “grassroots protests” are being organized and largely paid for by Washington special interests and insurance companies who are desperate to block reform. They’re trying to use lies and fear to break the President and his agenda for change.

“Largely paid for?” Who is paying what to whom and why? If this is true, how come we never hear any names of these evil companies or individuals? So far, all we’ve got is a memo from a guy running a PAC out of his basement. Specifically, which companies are paying the protestors? Which lobbying groups are giving people money to disrupt the town halls? If you don’t have any names, it’s a base political smear, nothing more.

Are big insurance companies paying people gas money to drive the few blocks to where the town hall meeting is being held? Isn’t the White House aware that the tea party groups have been organizing since February and have email lists of hundreds of volunteers in the area? Why do they need help from lobbyists to send out a couple of hundred emails?

The facts are a little less dramatic. And while Marshall and his cohort of lock-step liberals in the media drum on about “astroturfing” and “mobs,” the protests go on. Not always with the decorum and reasonableness that such a weighty subject demands. But as I said yesterday, that kind of disruptive action hurts much more than any fakery the liberals can come up with to delegitimize the protests.

This is highly speculative but you’ve probably heard by now that a couple of Alaska liberal bloggers “broke” the story about Sarah Palin’s supposed impending divorce from her husband.

It sure sounded solid coming from Alaska Report News:

AlaskaReport has learned today that Todd Palin and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin are to divorce. Multiple sources in Wasilla and Anchorage (including a former Palin staffer) have confirmed the split.

A National Enquirer story exposing previous affairs on both sides led to a deterioration of their marriage and the stress from that led to Palin’s resignation as governor of Alaska last week.

The Palins were noticeably not speaking to each other for most of last Sunday’s resignation speech in Fairbanks. Sarah ditched Todd (MSNBC) right after the speech and left without him. Sarah removed her wedding ring a couple of weeks ago.

Sarah has recently purchased land in Montana and is considering moving the family there. Sarah Palin is originally from Idaho.

Very interesting. But not true, according to Stacy McCain who evidently talked directly to Palin or someone who was authorized to speak on her behalf:

“Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd? I may be just a renegade hockey mom, but I’m not blind!”
– SARAH PALIN

Yes, that is her OFFICIAL reponse, which I got via phone at 5:35 this afternoon. Take that to the bank.

I might add that Alaska Report has a about as good a record as Gawker in breaking news - which is better than some MSM outlets but far from perfect. And Gryphen, who apparently started the whole divorce rumor, is even worse.

Nevertheless, once both those sites hit the internet with the story, the blog feeding frenzy on the left began, with a couple of MSM outlets joining in.

As someone who doesn’t consider himself a journalist but who has been around newsrooms for many years, let me just say that if this had come across my desk, I would have smelled a set up. It’s too pat, the pieces fit too nicely together (an “explanation” for why she resigned) not to raise alarms with real journalists. So I think there is at least the possibility, that either someone in the Palin camp with an ax to grind with the media - or, less likely, Palin herself - whispered a few words to a birdie they were sure would get the word to people who would publish it.

The definition of “pwn” is “1. An act of dominating an opponent, and 2. Great, ingenious; applied to methods and objects.” If this was a set up by the Palin camp, it worked magnificently. Now, most of the lefty blogosphere has egg on their face.

Several Alaska bloggers  hounded the former Alaskan governor with bogus ethics complaints while she was in office - Alaska Report being one of them. Could a little payback be at play here?

Stranger things have happened.