Maybe Later

This is how I feel today:


Image credit: I Has A Hot Dog


Reading and writing about politics sure can be depressing.

Fortunately, Eli was feeling more energetic today. It's as though the Democrats want to lose the election. Think I'm kidding, read the Jane Hamsher article that inspired Eli:

The question is, why did Van Hollen [lie to Democratic congressmen about the results of polling on health care]? Why did Pelosi and Hoyer and Reid and those who are supposed to care about Democratic majorities in Congress do that? Because you can not convince me that they did not know better. They absolutely did. Nobody is that stupid. They would have had polling data showing Democrats circling the drain on health care for months by that time.

But as Budoff-Brown writes, no “serious” establishment Democrat wanted to speak the truth until Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post shortly before the final vote “warning the party had deluded itself into thinking that Americans wanted the bill. And as a result, they wrote, Democrats ran the risk of ‘unmitigated disaster’ in November.”

Why Did the DCCC Lie To Their Members About Health Care?

That link is one that I added, which shows some polling data following the special election for Senator Ted Kennedy's Senate seat last January. It's indicative of the sort of data Jane was referring to. One of the reasons I do that is to illustrate this next point: It's hard for me to believe that those congressmen didn't know their own districts or states well enough to know the risks they were taking voting for the health care bill as written by Baucus, Wellpoint, and the Obama Administration.

Congressmen often do their own polls. Even when they don't, they have town meetings and other ways of communicating with the public. They had to know that the individual mandate, in particular, was something that most Americans were dead set against. That was true on both ends of the political spectrum. Yet they went ahead and did this anyway, despite what I, and anyone else with the least bit of sense (see Cadell and Schoen), told them.

Instead, they accused us of trying to enable the Republicans.

Do you think re-electing the kind of people who were this spineless, stupid, or thoughtless that they've gone along with all this foolishness would somehow stem the tide of crazy out there? Those people will do nothing but step out of the way and let it happen.

Expecting them to take a stand is as silly as expecting me to fetch a ball right now.