If I'd written this, it would be part of the "Progressive Idiocy" series, but Ian Welsh thought it up first. Discussing career progressives' insane desire to fight for a bill that makes us pay for health insurance we won't be able to afford to use, he writes:
Still, watching “progressives” defending the individual mandate is just another reminder of why I don’t call myself a progressive.Yes, it's true. They've made the idea of economic stimulus anathema to a great many voters, thanks to having made no real progress toward rehiring all the people who lost their jobs during the 2008 crash. They've made the idea that our government can kill anyone it wants to a progressive value.
Go and die on a hill, for forcing Americans to buy shitty insurance from evil companies which aren’t properly regulated.
I’ll just sit here on the sidelines laughing myself sick. With progressives like these, who needs right wingers?
Is the individual mandate really the hill progressives want to die on?
That's the legacy those idiots have left us.
I don't know what to do, other than call them out for the shameless hypocrites they are. That, and wish that there was some battlefield they could get themselves killed on. Unfortunately, people who won't really stand for something probably won't be the ones dying for an idea. They'll leave that to us, too.
If you ever wondered why I spend so much time bashing them, and so little criticizing Republicans, that's why. Because in modern America, there is really no place people who want to build a decent society can go any more, politically speaking.
Enjoy your birth control while it lasts.
UPDATE: A couple of other quotes that sum up my opinion of all this, the first is from VastLeft, whose blog I keep neglecting to add to the blogroll:
Despite recognizing Obama’s Reaganite tendencies, I voted for him as a statement against the GOP and for the first-black-president milestone. Seeing how he’s governed, dragging a country hungry for leftish reform back to the right as perhaps no one else could have, I sorely wish I’d voted for Cynthia McKinney instead.Ditto. This is one of those rare times when I actually listened to all those folks warning me about how awful the Republicans would be if they took power. Of course, many of those same folks are now making excuses for Obama's actions, none of which make sense unless you realize that this is what he was really about all along.
“Please allow me to introduce myself…”
Why am I so appalled by Obama? Glenn Greenwald provides another hint, regarding the Supreme Court's decision yesterday to allow strip searches by police of anyone for any trivial reason:
In essence, the Florence ruling grants prison officials license to subject every single arrested individual entering the general prison population to humiliating and highly invasive strip searches (that’s 13 million people every year, with hugely disproportionately minority representation), based on the definitive police state mentality — one that has been applied over and over — that isolated risks justify the most sweeping security measures. This policy has been applied to those arrested for offenses such as dog leash laws, peaceful protests, and driving with an expired license.I added that emphasis. The Obama Administration agrees with this ruling. How many professional progressives mentioned this? Very few. As VastLeft put it, we need to re-elect Obama so he'll continue to appoint judges who will rule against him.
What virtually none of this anti-Florence commentary mentioned, though, was that the Obama DOJ formally urged the Court to reach the conclusion it reached. While the Obama administration and court conservatives have been at odds in a handful of high-profile cases (most notably Citizens United and the health care law), this is yet another case, in a long line, where the Obama administration was able to have its preferred policies judicially endorsed by getting right-wing judges to embrace them[.]
The Obama DOJ And Strip Searches
This is why I think anyone who accepts the proposition that Obama will appoint progressive justices in his next term is someone who has not been paying attention these last three years. Obama does nothing on behalf of progressive issues that he doesn't absolutely have to do, and there's no reason to think he'd have to appoint progressive justices once he's re-elected.
NOTE1 As far as I know, no one else has come up with this idea yet. I'll claim authorship until someone demonstrates prior art.
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