Right Wing Nut House

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Dan Riehl, Charlie Martin, and the triumphal return of Jazz Shaw from the Dart Wars to talk about the aftermath of the Healthcare debate and what’s in the future for Obamacare.

The show will air from 7:00 - 9:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

My latest column is up at Pajamas Media and it is my response to the passage of Obamacare.

A sample:

Indeed, in a striking and ironic twist to the entire debate over nationalized health insurance, the president’s call for a bipartisan effort was met not by proponents of the bill, but by its enemies. The 34 Democrats who opposed the measure made the bill the president’s first success in creating a bipartisan coalition, although the fact that it almost derailed the effort to realize his dream of massive federal regulation of the insurance industry probably gives him little cheer.

What hath Congress wrought? The difference between what the president and congressional Democrats say the bill will do, and the likely effect the legislation will have on the lives of American citizens, is a chasm whose depth and girth is unknowable. What we know is that more people will have health insurance, and that those who currently have no insurance due to a pre-existing condition will be able to purchase policies. Beyond that, Democratic claims such as insurance that offers more benefits while costing less and no change in most citizens’ insurance plans are viewed with a jaundiced eye by serious analysts. If we didn’t know any better, we would accuse the Democrats of lying about this, except they wouldn’t lie about something as critically important as health insurance, would they?

It is written that doctors and hospitals will receive less in payments from the government for treating Medicare patients, but nobody believes that. It is written that the government will dutifully find hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare fraud, but no one believes they will find as much as they are saying they will. It is written that state Medicaid programs will be just fine with the sudden influx of 30 million new subscribers, although the balance between federal and state contributions to the program will not change and nobody believes the burden on states won’t skyrocket.

In short, despite the fact that no one believes some of the basic actuarial and fiscal assumptions that under-gird this legislation — no one who isn’t besotted with partisan fervor — it was rammed down the throats of the American people with as much cynicism, trickery, deliberate obfuscation, and budgetary tomfoolery as has ever been seen for a major piece of legislation in the history of the republic.

There will be court challenges to Obamacare but I doubt if they will be entirely successful. I further find it unlikely that the GOP, if they achieve majority status again, will be able to repeal it. Perhaps a combination of the two but that may be the most unlikely scenario at all.

Prediction? In five years, the Republican party will be embracing Obamacare and will be running on a platform that boasts they are the best party to manage it efficiently.

This post originally appears on The Moderate Voice.

The answer is, Alex — both, of course.

From the beginning, opposition to the tea party movement has sought to portray participants as a fringe element of conservatism; radical, anti-government protestors who never met a program they could support, or a Democrat who wasn’t either a communist or socialist. Racist, homophobic, rabidly partisan, and dangerously myopic, such analyses of the tea partiers was de rigueur in both liberal and major media outlets.

Why the caricature? In truth, opponents fear the tea partiers as the vanguard of a truly unique citizen’s movement; one based on the simple notion that the Constitution has relevance beyond how the Supreme Court interprets it and how Congress ignores its First Principles.

Indeed, its seems a quaint notion that any citizen can interpret the Constitution as they see fit. Not that such strikingly innocent and naive insights matter as far as the law goes. But it could very well be that for a great many people, it will matter as far as politics is concerned. We might judge the efficacy of tea partiers interpreting the Constitution as it relates to specifics like health care reform, and dismiss the effort as the well meaning, but flawed attempts by ordinary citizens to try and come to grips with the enormity of what government has become. But you cannot dismiss their seriousness, nor their earnest desire to bring Gargantua under some kind of control that would matter to citizens of this republic.

I have written previously that in many ways, the core of the tea party movement takes its cues from a 19th century view of how government should work. Would that at least at its most basic operation, and in gathering any inspiration, the government would pay heed to that notion. There is absolutely nothing wrong in preferring self reliance over dependency, less government interference in markets rather than more, and a strong federal system of states that would be more accountable to the people than Washington presently demonstrates.

The problem is that such a template does not fit over an industrialized, globalized nation of 300 million diverse people with even more diverse interests. The regional disputes of 125 years ago have been left behind for the most part, and we now have clashing interests with global implications regarding how they are settled. And while those First Principles should still inspire and guide us, the details are a little more complicated. Hence, the fingernail-across-the-blackboard grating whenever we hear a tea partier spout about this or that being “unconstitutional.”

Bruce Bartlett analyzed an unscientific survey of tea partiers taken by David Frum’s group that, not suprisingly, demonstrated how misinformed many tea partiers are about taxes:

Tuesday’s Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944.

To follow up, Tea Partyers were asked how much they think a typical family making $50,000 per year pays in federal income taxes. The average response was $12,710, the median $10,000. In percentage terms this means a tax burden of between 20% and 25% of income.

Of course, it’s hard to know what any particular individual or family pays in taxes, but according to IRS tax tables, a single person with $50,000 in taxable income last year would owe $8,694 in federal income taxes, and a married couple filing jointly would owe $6,669.

Both Frum and Bartlett take this is proof positive that the tea partiers don’t know what they’re talking about. This is true — just as most Americans don’t know much about government; how it works, how a bill is passed, the importance of the bureaucracy, etc. I fail to see why it is an earth shattering revelation that tea partiers are uninformed when recent surveys show that high school graduates are so ignorant of our country’s history and workings, that anyone with half a brain should stand in terror of the future:

Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can name the first President of the United States, according to a survey released today.

The survey was commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in observance of Constitution Day on Thursday.

The Oklahoma City-based group enlisted national research firm, Strategic Vision, to access students’ basic civic knowledge.

Brandon Dutcher is with the conservative think tank and said the organization wanted to find out how much civic knowledge Oklahoma high school students know.

“They’re questions taken from the actual exam that you have to take to become a U.S. citizen,” Dutcher said.

A thousand students were surveyed by telephone and given 10 questions drawn from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services item bank. Candidates for U.S. citizenship must answer six questions correctly in order to become citizens.

About 92 percent of the people who take the citizenship test pass on their first try, according to immigration service data. However, Oklahoma students did not fare as well. Only about 3 percent of the students surveyed would have passed the citizenship test.

Misinformed? Yes. Shallow? An understanding of the Constitution that runs a mile wide and a centimeter deep. Fearful? Beyond being manipulated by the cotton candy conservatives on talk radio, the fear of change is so ripe you can smell it in many sections of the country.

I’m not talking about Obama-type change. I’m talking about the undercurrent of change that constantly runs through history and that occasionally, breaks ground in a flood that, when it ebbs, reveals a much altered landscape. Most people who inhabit such a place are not prepared for, nor can they manage the seminal changes that have made the familiar, unfamiliar.

America has been undergoing a radical change for more than 20 years. Our entire economy has flipped from being industrial-based to service-based, with the consequent changes in wages, lifestyle, and mores occurring faster than many can absorb. The old moorings by which most of us clung have been torn away and some have been let adrift — strangers in their own land.

The catalyst that revealed this was the financial crisis and the growing realization that recovery will be a slow, painful process no matter whether we stupidly try to spend our way to prosperity or cut taxes and risk even higher deficits, thus stifling growth. Millions of jobs are gone and it will take years to recreate the kind of economy where anyone who wants a job can get one.

With all of this happening, can you blame the tea partiers for grasping at the one talisman that has served as a steadying influence on America for 222 years? The Constitution as legal document and patriotic connection to our past is as a life buoy tossed to a drowning man. Given that there are far worse symbols upon which citizens could tie themselves — including the Communist Manifesto as some of the anti-war protestors appeared to have embraced — you would think that critics would grant tea partiers a little slack in their choice of iconic American notions to idolize.

Further, the notion that a few yahoos who scream the “N” word at a Civil Rights icon like James Lewis, or yell an equally hurtful epithet at Barney Frank is representative of the vast majority of tea partiers is absurd on its face. It might be comforting to try and smear the entire movement in this manner. After all, employing the race card has a long, dishonorable history among tea party critics. And taken in the context of the super-intensity of the health care debate a day before the vote, one can easily understand why opponents of the tea partiers would drag the old saw out of the closet and try and brand the entire movement as “fringe” or “hateful.”

True, many tea partiers appear not to have a clue about manners — as they proved during last summer’s health care town halls. In fact, I would argue that this type of behavior has hurt the cause of reform opponents more than the tea partier’s importunings have helped. But you can’t dismiss them as “rabble” or “racists” based on the actions of a pitifully few louts. To do so is to act as shallowly and as ignorantly as any tea partier you accuse of behaving badly.

Bad manners or not, the passion of these ordinary folk has caused the fear factor among Democrats to rise substantially. It doesn’t matter why they are angry; some of their reasons may be bogus, others are spot on. The point is that they are aroused enough to vote against Democrats — and even some apostate Republicans — in November in huge numbers.

And this fear is driving the actions of the tea partier’s opponents as much as it is driving the movement itself.

This is my PJ Media column from Friday that took the Democrats to task for trying to game the CBO numbers.

A sample:

It’s been known for many months that the cost of the health care bill has been phoney baloney budgetary gimmicks. Most of the costs of the bill won’t kick in until 2013, while the bulk of the costs would be picked up in the next six years. A true cost of this bill over the first ten years (2013-2023) is well into the trillions of dollars.

CBO makes no apologies for basing their projections on what they acknowledge is tomfoolery. Nor do they seem to see it as their job to highlight this legislative legerdemain.

I guess that’s why they’re “non-partisan.” They cooperate in hoodwinking the American people with both parties.

[...]

Sleight of hand, double counting, magical thinking — one would think we were talking about a Houdini memorabilia convention and not the most important piece of domestic legislation in more than a generation. But in service to saving Obama’s presidency, anything is allowable.

Besides, does anyone really believe the CBO has a handle on how much this Gargantua is going to cost? Or how much we’re going to save? Or how much it will cut the deficit 20 years from now?

History is an unforgiving vixen. What the past tells us about the future is that never in the history of entitlement spending have estimated costs ever come anywhere near the actual expenditures. And the further out the predictions, the more spectacularly inaccurate they become.

How proponents of Obamacare can justify their support based on this bill saving the US taxpayer money is incredibly disingenuous. Either that, or they, like the Democratic leadership up to and including our president, simply don’t care. I wouldn’t go so far as some on the right and claim that this is a conscious effort to control our lives - even though I believe that will be the ultimate result of the legislation once it becomes obvious that the only way to control costs is to try and control how people live. But I think that Democrats believe they can “fix” what’s massively wrong with the bill at a later date.

There is no case to be made for this bill to reduce health care costs, reduce federal expenditures on health care, help save Medicare, or do anything that makes insurance more affordable. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch. What we have here is a case where the Democrats and their allies in the media know all this. The GOP knows it. Anyone who has been paying attention to what’s in this bill knows it. My pet cat Snowball knows it. And yet, one side is pretending that black is white, up is down, and that this bill will do most everything the proponents are claiming it will.

Ladies and gentlemen…the Reality Based Community.

As of today, I am no longer going to post a daily essay on this site.

The reasons are not surprising. My two paying jobs take up around 12 hrs a day - sometimes more - and it has become a burden to try and get something on this site every day.

Besides, I have wanted to write for other publications like, forever, but this blog has become something of a millstone in that it has prevented me from devoting time to carefully crafting and polishing pieces for which other publications might pay me some coin. By not having to worry about getting something on RWNH every day, I can take my time, think and write more intelligently over a couple of days, while actually editing the final product so that it is something that might sell.

I will also be able to contribute again to American Thinker and Newsreal Blog. Those submissions will appear, as usual, in their entirety on this site.

Other articles that might be published, I will supply a link and a sample as I have done with my PJ Media efforts.

In short, the blog will become a place where if you’re interested in what I’m writing about, you’ll be able to find out without any trouble.

Two days short of 5 1/2 years of almost daily essays - 3,335 posts. I suspect I’ll be posting links to my articles at least 3-4 times a week, and hopefully more so I really hope you stay in touch with the site via your blog reader or just drop by occasionally.

Thanks for your support.

Rick Moran
Proprietor

We like to think of ourselves as a compassionate people. We also pride ourselves on possessing good old fashioned American common sense.

Those two American traits are on a collision course that, when they collide, will present us with a moral and ethical dilemma that Obamacare is ignoring, and that few of us are thinking about at all.

I’m talking about the stark, and uncomfortable choices we will have to face when our ability to pay for “anything goes” end of life care smashes into our out of control Medicare deficits.

To put it another way, do we bankrupt ourselves, not to save lives but to extend them? Should a 66 year old man suffering from heart disease that will kill him in a year be eligible for a kidney transplant that, if he doesn’t receive the organ, kill him in a matter of weeks?

I addressed some of these issues generally here. The raw data is fairly straightforward. Currently, we are spending $50 billion a year on “end of life” care. A big chunk of that is in hospital stays for dying people who would almost certainly be just as comfortable in a hospice or even at home.

Beyond the question of where a dying American should be treated, there are the painful choices regarding how the patient will exit this world. The problem grows out of the miracles that are routine in American medicine; a drug or a treatment is invented that deals with an underlying symptom of a disease that is killing a patient but has no chance of curing him. The question of whether to grant the dying patient something that will extend life by addressing a health issue that, if not treated, might kill him sooner, while failing to cure his underlying illness is one of those issues that will have to be discussed if we are to both maintain our compassion while trying to solve the fiscal mess that is Medicare.

Obamacare ignores the whole thing - including serious cost containment issues for Medicare of any kind. And it is difficult to see how any serious attempt at “reforming” our medical care system can claim that mantle while allowing these issues to fester.

There are two easy ways out; death panels and giving patients whatever they want. The organization of the proposed Medicare cost effectiveness panel will mandate certain treatments for diseases but will not touch these end of life issues with a ten foot pole. But one could imagine such a scenario occurring in the future if costs continue to spiral upwards.

Obamacare had something of a “fix” for this situation. It gave Medicare the authority to pay for one doctor visit every 5 years where the patients would be informed of their rights regarding what proponents call a “durable power of attorney.” Such a document would specify what kinds of treatments would be acceptable at the end of life, made while the patient was of strong mind and body.

The idea that this would be some kind of effort by the government to force people to euthanize themselves when they get sick is outrageously ignorant. All it does is offer some guidance for your physician those last two month of life. So few of us have these instructions for our physician that right now, the doctor is forced to practice preventive medicine, fearing lawsuits if he doesn’t use the entire panoply of treatments in order to keep a patient going despite the terminal nature of his disease.

Some may wish those extraordinary measures taken. Others wouldn’t. And if we don’t start thinking about it more, we are going to wake up one day where the government is simply going to make those decisions for us.

On my radio show on Tuesday night, we had a hard time coming to grips with the issues involved. I asked Rich Baehr, a health care consultant for 30 years, if one of the problems is that there is the widespread view that health care is a zero sum game, that using resources for those at the end of life takes away from those who need them nearer the beginning. In other words, is there a finite amount of resources available for health care? Even if that is not true, it’s the way that supporters of Obamacare are acting. And if they believe it, then the scenario of government making end of life decisions for us becomes dangerously real down the road.

It needn’t be this way. Part of the solution is almost certainly education - informing Medicare patients of their options regarding end of life treatment and having them plan for that eventuality. Beyond that, it’s a little more complicated; it turns out, that many end of life caregivers believe that nothing short of a revolution in how we view death itself must come about in order for us to avoid both fiscal calamity and decisions at that critical, intimate, and fearful point in life being taken away from us:

Marcia Klish might have lingered for quite some time in the intensive care unit at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. But Dr. Byock and his team had a number of meetings with her closest friend, Barbara Menchin. She said Klish would not want to be kept alive on machines if there was no meaningful hope of recovery.

It was decided the doctors would not try to resuscitate her if her condition worsened, which it soon did.

“Her heart has just flipped into a rhythm that doesn’t allow it to beat effectively,” Byock told Menchin.

Klish died a few moments later.

“This is a hard time in human life. But it’s just a part of life,” Byock said.

“Collectively, as a culture, we really have to acknowledge that we’re mortal,” he said. “Get over it. And start looking at what a healthy, morally robust way for people to die looks like.”

Dr. Byok is not a ghoul or heartless monster. He is a compassionate man who is put every day into situations where he knows that, if properly explained, he could ease the passage of his patients considerably. But this is a system that is set up so that the patient has no clue what their true options are and those who might want to spend their final days at home or in hospice are instead, treated to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars of care that has nothing to do with curing what ails them.

By law, Medicare cannot reject any treatment based upon cost. It will pay $55,000 for patients with advanced breast cancer to receive the chemotherapy drug Avastin, even though it extends life only an average of a month and a half; it will pay $40,000 for a 93-year-old man with terminal cancer to get a surgically implanted defibrillator if he happens to have heart problems too.

“I think you cannot make these decisions on a case-by-case basis,” Byock said. “It would be much easier for us to say ‘We simply do not put defibrillators into people in this condition.’ Meaning your age, your functional status, the ability to make full benefit of the defibrillator. Now that’s going to outrage a lot of people.”

“But you think that should happen?” Kroft asked.

“I think at some point it has to happen,” Byock said.

“Well, this is a version then of pulling Grandma off the machine?” Kroft asked.

“You know, I have to say, I think that’s offensive. I spend my life in the service of affirming life. I really do. To say we’re gonna pull Grandma off the machine by not offering her liver transplant or her fourth cardiac bypass surgery or something is really just scurrilous. And it’s certainly scurrilous when we have 46 million Americans who are uninsured,” Byock said.

This is a question I asked in my previous post on this subject:

When a society is faced with a crisis that may lead to its dissolution, is it a higher moral choice to abandon individual ethics and morality to save it? Are we really facing this kind of moral conundrum or am I setting up a “false choice” where another solution is available but I am refusing to acknowledge it?

If we can’t face this issue ourselves; if we can’t come to grips with this delicate and personal issue, then someone is going to do it for us. There’s no continuing the way we are going now.

It’s a pity that in a “comprehensive” reform bill, no mention is made of these vital and complex issues.

A little change of pace from me over at PJ Media today. Two pop culture icons — one falling, the other rising — demonstrate a capacity for mocking the culture that created them.

A sample; first, on Bauer:

The sense of duty is still there, but to what? All Bauer seems to have left is a personal code of honor to which he is loyal. Gone is the clear notion that Jack was fighting for America, replaced by a much more individualistic sense of “me vs. them.” Bauer fights a private war now, for his own goals and his own reasons. It diminishes him in ways that reduces his impact on the culture. It’s like Bauer has gone from Captain America to Captain Crunch.

It isn’t so much that Bauer has become a liberal, or now reflects liberal sensibilities about the war on terror. That’s not entirely accurate. Instead, the character is now a parody of the old Jack, a notion reinforced by the writers deliberately eschewing the tactics used by the old Bauer, while steering the new Jack away from almost all controversy. The old Jack not only tortured suspects; he routinely thumbed his nose at the bureaucrats and his superiors. He seemed to have adopted the old Davy Crockett motto: “Be sure you’re right — then go ahead.”

Now, Jack Bauer defers to authority in ways he never would have in the first years of the show. He has been defanged in an effort perhaps to widen his appeal. Instead, the effect is to parody what made Bauer such a powerful image of American strength and determination to take the fight directly to the terrorists. The old Jack Bauer probably belonged in a cage. The new Bauer only needs a leash. And the difference is a reflection of how pop culture has changed the last decade. Cynicism and a general malaise have overtaken the explosive and often over-the-top exuberance that was once the hallmark of the American pop scene.

And I am goo-goo for Gaga:

Gaga disassociates her music from the images because she is using the video as a vehicle to send up iconic pop culture images and hence, pop culture itself. It is one gigantic inside joke that almost everyone is in on.

Her send-ups are not performed with any reverence or sense of homage, but with a desire to impose an ironic juxtaposition between the pop culture images she mocks and her own over-the-top personae. And in so doing, she consciously brings herself full circle from pop icon to a self-mocking caricature of a pop artist — a cardboard cutout so depthless and shallow, so deliberately provocative and outrageous, that the creative product — her music — actually aids in the parody by standing at arms length from the “art” of the delivery system. The art ignores the reality Gaga has created onscreen, imposing its own pleasant association with another world.

In the “Telephone” video, for instance, she is bailed out of the “Prison for Bitches” (following some rank lesbian and fetish images both designed to shock and evoke amusement) by formerly squeaky clean Beyonce. The two then take off in a Thelma and Louise adventure, parodying Quentin Tarantino’s epic Kill Bill films as well as Pulp Fiction by driving in a vehicle named “The Pussywagon” (Kill Bill) and stopping at a diner (Pulp Fiction) just long enough to poison the patrons by slipping a toxin into their food. They then drive off, the sound of police cars pursuing in the distance, and the imitation of the iconic raised handclasp of Thelma and Louise right before they drove over the cliff is used as a parody of solidarity between the two mega-stars.

Read the whole thing.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, we’ll stretch the show to two hours and bring in some of the smartest bloggers and writers out there. Rich Baehr and Ed Lasky of the American Thinker, Stephen Green of Vodkapundit, and Monica Showalter of Investors Business Daily will fire up and let it fly about all things health care reform.

The show will air from 7:00 - 9:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

They all sound so confident, don’t they? Gibbs says that this time next week, health care reform will be passed. Pelosi says she has the votes now (I call bullsh*t on that - as does Pelosi’s own whip Rep. Clyburn). Axelrod, who must have been drunk yesterday morning, dared the GOP to run in the fall on repealing the bill. Um, yeah. And since the only people who are going to vote next midterm are people who are mad at the Democrats because of the economy and mad at them because of health care reform, Ax better find a nice deserted island to try and hide from the tsunami that is going to hit his party in the fall. If he thinks Americans are going to turn out in droves in November and thank Obama for this monstrosity, he is kidding himself.

But that’s the future and the immediate problem for the Democrats is to find a way to 216. The estimable Nate Silver explains:

It seems to me that there are sort of two equilbiria: either essentially all of the non-Stupak yes votes hold, in which case health care passes very narrowly (perhaps with exactly 216 votes) — or the floodgates open, there are a few key defections about half-way into the roll call, and anybody with a grievance deserts the bill, in which case all of the sudden it might struggle to get 200 votes. (Of course, Pelosi doesn’t have to hold a vote, and would probably want to avoid such an embarrassing outcome — but it’s not out of the question that she could push the measure to the floor not knowing the result, and that things could totally unravel during the roll call.)

Right now, I’d place slightly more weight on the former case: that Pelosi holds together somewhere between 216 and 218 votes. For essentially the first time during the health care battle, all of the key Democratic constituencies are lined up behind the bill: the Congressional leadership, the White House, the unions, the non-Naderite activists. And when one cuts through all the clutter, the vote-counting news has basically been pretty good for the Demorats: (i) the Stupak bloc is toward the smaller end of its prospective range; (ii) some non-retiring no votes, such as Jason Altmire and Scott Murphy, have been openly flirting with a yes; (iii) none of the non-Stupak yes votes have yet flipped.

A lot of members are playing this close to the vest, but I think Nate is correct. After all the leveraging, and maneuvering, and hand wringing by Blue Dogs, Pelosi is probably 5 or 6 votes short at this point. And the full court press for passage that will be initiated this week by Obama-Pelosi is going to be awesome to watch.

This whip count is based on publicly declared positions of members, which is useful to see how some Democrats are playing the game, but not particularly accurate as to what is happening on the Hill. Rich Baehr, my colleague at American Thinker and one of the sharpest political minds you’ll find, has been saying for months that Pelosi probably has 6-10 - maybe a handful more - of Democrats who voted “no” the first time around but who got “permission” to do so from the Speaker because she had the vote wrapped up. In essence, she granted them a stay of execution if - a big if - she could count on them for the final vote.

She is probably going to have to pull several of those Democrats out of her magic hat for passage. That’s because there may be at least six and as many as 10 Democrats who voted “yes” the first time around but have indicated they are going to vote “no” this time. A couple of those who have said they are leaning against voting despite supporting the bill in December are no doubt looking for a little leverage. Chicago Congressman Luis Gutierrez, for example, has made noises about voting “no” because the issues of illegals being able to purchase insurance is not addressed. But he will almost certainly be a yes vote when push comes to shove.

Dennis Kucinich is another vote that might switch from yes to no but again, I doubt if he will want to be remembered as the liberal who killed national health care. Expect a Road to Damascus conversion from Mr. Potato Head.

That leaves the “Stupak Six That Used to Be 12 But Nobody Believed That Anyway.” I’m afraid that the lobbying efforts to get those holdouts on board will not be pleasant. The combined ability of the Speaker of the House and the President of the United States to make life difficult for a Congressman is awesome. By mid-week, it is going to get awfully lonely for Bart’s boys unless they play ball.

With 25 confirmed “no” Democratic votes, that puts the Republicans at 203 - so close and yet so far. In essence, they need to get 13 of the remaining 37 fence sitters. This sounds doable until you realize that there’s not a thing the GOP can offer these Democrats while Obama-Pelosi can promise the moon or threaten them with hell. There will be some resisters but it is very difficult to see where the Republicans are going to get the votes. It will take uncommon courage to look the president or the Speaker in the eye and turn them down when they are appealing to party, to history, to the viability of Obama’s presidency.

No doubt Rahmbo will be on the phone reminding the holdouts of the president’s ability to not only make them, but break them too. For example, the discretionary authority a president has to release funds earmarked for specific congressional districts will mean the difference between getting funds for that road building project, or old folks recreational center approved before or after the election. That’s real power that a member can’t ignore.

The blandishment of a presidential visit can be effective also. Meanwhile, Pelosi can promise a better committee assignment next January, or banish the member to the post office committee. Co-sponsors for a member’s bill can suddenly dry up. And PAC money from other members may not be forthcoming.

The point is simple; vote against reform and there will be unpleasant consequences. How many of those 37 waverers have the courage to resist the onslaught? In the end, it will be easier to go along and worry about getting re-elected later. Besides, they can always believe the codswallop that by the fall, the American people will absolutely love Obamacare and thank their representative for being such a swell fellow and voting for it.

Can it be stopped? The courage to resist may indeed be found given the stakes. And one should not give up trying to influence the vote (I’ve written three emails to my own Congresswoman, Debbie Halverson, who is a possible no). And perhaps Nate’s scenario of a floor revolt may come to pass, although I don’t think Pelosi will have any kind of a meaningful vote until she’s reasonably sure she has 216.

Situation grave, but not hopeless.

It isn’t necessarily true in historical circles, but the Pacific campaign during World War II has mostly received short shrift from popular culture, as well as popular histories.

Now HBO is going to remedy that shortcoming with a gigantic 10 part miniseries entitled The Pacific. By most reports, it is a winner - a worthy companion piece to the best miniseries in TV history, Band of Brothers. (Sorry Roots fans but as gripping as that miniseries was, it failed on several levels in its portrayal of history.)

While it is a subjective accolade I give to BoB, the sheer ambition of the project made it tops in my book. That, and the extraordinary characters who made up Easy Company, drawn with loving care, and so far above the usual miniseries one dimensional fare that few other projects have come close. Not coincidentally, another HBO series, John Adams, makes a run at BoB for character development. But despite a strict adherence to historical facts, it never rose above a rather parochial and ordinary view of Adams as an American original rather than the world historical figure he was.

The Pacific promises to fill in some very large, very obvious blanks in our cultural understanding of what happened on those battlefields. First and foremost, the Pacific war was a naval war - “A gut bustin’, mother lovin’ naval war,” as Kirk Douglas playing Commander Paul Eddington opined after Pearl Harbor in Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way. The island hopping strategy of McArthur meant that not only ships were required to ferry his forces from hot spot to hot spot, but that American carriers supplied the air power that supported troop landings as well as keeping the supply lines free of Japanese interference.

And Admiral Halsey’s northern Pacific strategy also relied on carriers to get the job done. Ironically, our massive losses at Pearl Harbor forced us to rely on carriers for advancing across the Pacific, despite the fact that until well into 1944, it was still thought by both sides that the decisive naval engagement of the war would occur when the battleships of both sides squared off for one, gigantic Super-Trafalgar, or Jutland. Such never occurred, while our emphasis on sea-air power allowed us to push the Japanese back to their perimeter defenses.

While this was happening at sea, what was occurring on the ground in places like Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, and other seemingly insignificant piles of volcanic rock, turned out to be a nightmare every bit as terrifying and bloody as any combat Americans have fought anywhere in the world before or since.

Apparently, The Pacific will not stint on showing this:

Modern war movies don’t hold back on the bloodier aspects of combat, a trend unofficially cemented with Steven Spielberg‘s 1998 epic Saving Private Ryan.

The Pacific continues in that vein without feeling exploitative or cheap. The carnage underscores the constant danger Marines faced as they poured onto battlefields already teeming with enemy soldiers.

Viewers will feel the concussive force of every mortar shell and sniper round, a visceral torrent nearly unmatched in modern war pictures.

And, of course, what can never be truly caught on film, the abject terror of the unsettling Japanese tactic of mounting suicide attacks at night, where desperate fighting became hand to hand and the war telescoped down to American soldiers trying to stop a fanatic from skewering him with a bayonet.

No book tells this story better than William Manchester’s Goodbye Darkness, that opens with a frank, brutal, searing recounting of how Manchester killed a Japanese soldier up close and personal. That’s the kind of war it was and it had American fighting men having to make a choice; they could despair over the fact that the Japanese were so willing to sacrifice themselves just to get close enough to kill them. Or, they could adopt an absolutely heartless attitude that allowed them to shoot down Japanese soldiers even if they were surrendering.

This grim job was necessary because, as Ronald Spector points out in Eagle Against the Sun, the Japanese military creed of bushido made surrender not only something that would dishonor the individual soldier, but his family as well. So when all was lost, the Japanese soldier was more than likely to pretend to surrender while killing any American who came close enough. Similar instances of Japanese wounded who waited for an American to get close and see if they were dead before trying to kill their enemy were very common as well. The fact that our boys didn’t wait around to see if a Japanese soldier was really surrendering or really dead means that very few POW’s were taken and even fewer wounded POW’s. If you wanted to stay alive, you killed anything with a Japanese uniform on it.

This was the nature of the war. But there are those who have deliberately - or ignorantly - tried to push the notion that the real reason for our brutality was that we were racists and that the entire war in the Pacific - up to and including Hiroshima - could be explained because we saw the Japanese as less than human.

Tom Hanks in Time Magazine:

Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

Hanks is by no means the first or only revisionist to ignore Pearl Harbor, and the nature of Pacific warfare, to point to our behavior and cry “racism.”

Here’s James Carroll writing in the Boston Herald:

The Iwo Jima image is sacred precisely because the men lifting up the fallen flag are all but unable to do so. The extremity of their exhaustion, their nearness to defeat, the horrors of what they have been through and of what awaits them are all implied in the painful stretch of limbs, in the rough gear of armored clothing, in the absolute investment each has made in a symbol of something better than himself. Even as the valor of what they did on one beachhead after another is properly honored, the American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war. To raise the flag at Iwo Jima was to lift the transcendent symbol out of the total hell that the war had become. Few if any men who survived it came home speaking of virtue.

Historical accuracy note: the famous flag raising pic on Iwo Jima was actually a picture of the raising of a second, much larger flag. The first flag raising was done by a recon patrol who managed to reach the top of Mt. Suribachi and raise a smaller standard. This overheated, hysterical description is a crock.

A “vengeful refusal” to take prisoners? More like a common sense precaution. And what is war anywhere except a “generalized brutality?” The question isn’t so much was racism a factor in the war. One need only examine our detention policy for American citizens of Japanese descent to agree with that statement. But was it the dominant motivation for the savage combat in the Pacific? Ask the Japanese who saw Americans as sub-humans and treated them that way in POW camps and most especially, on the Bataan Death March.

Hanks, Carroll, and their fellow travelers must ignore, forget, or otherwise subsume certain historical facts in order to arrive at their nonsensical notions of racism being a dominant motivation for our Marines and GI’s in the Pacific war. It doesn’t stand up to the facts.

Hopefully, The Pacific will rise above such idiocies and give the participants in that campaign long overdue homage. There simply hasn’t been the kind of attention paid to these warriors as has been given to participants in the European theater. There have been some excellent books on the Pacific War. I mentioned Spector’s excellent tome. And Barbara Tuchman’s Stillwell and the American Experience in China
offers a compelling and cautionary look at that much misunderstood theater. For sheer beauty of prose, Manchester’s book is one of the best. Alexander’s Utmost Savagery: The Three Days at Tarawa might be the best book on any single battle I’ve ever read. And another good memoir by a real hard case - Eugene Sledge - With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa describes what he went through on Okinawa in a way that makes Truman’s use of the atom bomb totally justifiable.

These and a few other popular histories nothwithstanding, there simply is no comparison with the volume of books written about D-Day, or The Bulge, or most other important battles in the European Theater. It could be that there just weren’t the number of troops involved, or the unbalanced coverage in the press at the time contributed to the illusion that what was happening in the Pacific was a “sideshow” to the war being fought against Hitler.

More books, more movies, more TV shows, more plays - the European theater seems to have embedded itself in our national consciousness in a far greater way than what happened in the Pacific. I sincerely hope that The Pacific begins an evening up process that is long overdue.