With A Passion

Game Change co-author John Heilemann has a piece in this week’s NYMag where he wonders about the upside for democrats to having Scott Brown win Ted Kennedy’s seat. Well, it doesn’t look that way to me, and I guess that might be because I’m not a weekly contrarian who’s supporting the President’s delusions in the hope of getting close enough to write a sequel. What happened in Massachussets just aggravated the folks who wanted to think the Democratic Party’s days of drowning in inch-high water were over. Which up until a couple nights ago, I was pretty sure was going to continue to be reason you could exchange for cold hard cash at even the zombiest of banks. Martha Coakley, it turns out, had to be a sacrificial lamb to show the entire Democratic Party to look itself in the mirror, take off the Bipartisanship Beer Goggles, and realize that they’re all alone now, and it’s not that bad. As long as the Democrats can clean themselves up, try and remember which iconic sports legends are important to their districs (and almost ran against them for crying out loud), there’s a future out there, and it doesn’t need to include nudie models in pickup trucks.

Heilemann says maybe Scott Brown is a guy who isn’t a big dumbass like everyone else with an R affixed to the end of their name. What evidence do we have to run on, with this? The fact that he’s voted for health care in Massachussets? Well, fuck, he’s said he wouldn’t vote for health care reform for the country now so surprise surpise, he’s just another god damn hypocrite who will support one policy and claim that when they vote against it, only after the President supports said policy, that 1) they never supported it, and 2) supporting it now would ruin our freedom and make the founding fathers cry in their graves. We all know that the only founding fathers that the GOP cares about now are the fringe lunatic bigots who are still doing Civil War reenactments where they get to take turns pretending to be The Greatest Man Alive and the new face on the $1 BIll: Robert E. Lee. Look at McCain veering hard right in fear of the teabagger polling ahead of him. All the GOP seems to care about is nurturing the jobless morons with enough time to protest on Washington and not enough brain cells to have any clue why. And yes, I’m mocking them for being unable to hold their jobs at the McDonalds drive-thru window, because I’m sure that’s the only place that would hire the people dumb enough to be writing the signs we’ve all seen.

But back to my point, that there is a positive outcome of the election in MA. It reminded Obama that he’s the head of a party of … well … they’re not all bad, but they’ve got a lot of folks who have been behaving like … well, … and I don’t mean the ones Rahm meant when he used the phrase, but … “procreating delayers.” It provoked Obama to reenact the movie 300 by taking on as many GOP climate change denying hot air buffoons that would show their face in a room with him, and to do it by himself. He knew that if he had certain members of the party in the room with him, they’re known as Conservadems, they’d probably start peeing their pants when the republicans started throwing out straw man ideas like the “Tort Reform Would Fix Everything!” shit that anyone who has been doing their homework, which obviously the President had, could disprove with less energy than it takes to keep Boehner looking like The Thing. Even Brick Tamland is more convincing than Evan Bayh.

But in the last two days, it also seems to have woken the progressive wing of the party up, most of whom seemed to have been keeping quiet during the clusterfucks organized by Chuck Grassley, because they realized that the GOP isn’t going to do anything to help pass health reform on the 25th at the Ideas To The Magical Table Summit. We all know that, because the week prior to Tuesday had been spent by people like Eric Cantor trying to say the political porridge wasn’t warm enough for him to feel safe entering a room with the President and the Democrats. I’ll change my Twitter avatar to Michael Steele if the event on the 25th does anything to help further bipartisanship, which is close to the bet that 11 progressives have made in the last two days with some of them authoring and the rest cosigning a letter to Harry Reid, telling him to bring the Public Option back, and use reconciliation to get it through. By making this statement, these democrats are saying, we don’t really give a fuck about the GOP, and why the hell should we?

That’s a sentiment that might have dawned on those watching Obama’s Question Time with Republicans, if they hadn’t felt it before. Obama’s line explaining how the GOP roped themselves into voting against Health Care Reform seems to be where the lightbulb might have finally come on. He argued that after spooking the villagers into thinking that Death Panels were fact, that there’s no way they would have voted for reform. If I’ll give the Democrats points overall in any way, I’d say that most of them know better than Obama about trusting Republicans. Why would the Republicans have spooked the hillbilly teabagging moonshining comic book ducks in a barrel if they had wanted to vote for health care? These people are at least smart enough to know that there are no death panels. Even Michelle Bachmann, I’d assume knows that she’s lying. So if they know they’re lying, then they have no intent to vote for it, so let’s forget about 60.

It kind of reminds me of Kevin Eubanks taking his guitar and telling Leno where to shove it, as it’s been announced that Jay’s gonna need to find a new chuckle buddy. The Democrats have been sitting in the corner with a mix of smiles and winces, while the big chinned morons are telling what they take for jokes and gladhanding the dipshits. It took a big kick in the face to wake ‘em up, but hey, it’s not nearly as easy to be run over by a pickup truck when you’re awake.