Obama Kung-Fu Panda™

There was a lot of talk this weekend about the perceived White House softening on the public option due to a comment made by President Obama during a town hall meeting in Colorado (which I think wasn't a softening at all if you listen to what he was trying to say in the overall context) and an interview by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in which she stated that the public option is "not the essential element" in health care reform. I was still hesitant to think that all the "president is backing off the public option" ballyhoo was actually the case considering that Congress is not in session and the MSM was hungry for something to fill their time other than Michael Jackson's brain.

In any case, the possibility that this could happen was a breaking point for the left who have started to mobilize. Whether progressives and liberals were coming off the Obama honeymoon or whether they realized that they had to be as vocal as the misinformed, gun-toting nutballs at the town hall meetings, the pushback has finally started.

My theory: I think the Sebelius statement was a trial balloon. If the statement was used to gauge a perceived softening on the public option or an actual one is up for debate. The end result is the liberal and progressive base got tired of laying back and are now on the offensive to the benefit of the Obama administration, even though their outrage is directed at the ever-tiring Democratic capitulation.

But some are now writing that this may have been part of the plan all along; some more Obama Kung-Fu. And if you think about it, you can whip up your base into a frenzy by looking like you are softening to the GOP and losing your spine, because in the end you really aren't going to lose your liberal base. What liberal or progressive in their right mind would vote for ANY Republican?

Now, President Obama has always said that change has to start with us. On that I agree. But the way this has been unfolding, I'm finding it a little hard to believe that it's all part of a grand plan, that this administration although very savvy, is always ten steps ahead of absolutely everyone else. (If they are, then we are in for an awesome eight years.)

Ultimately, I don't think that the White House will accept a final bill without a public option, but if there had been no outrage from the left, if we had become defeatist and complacent (and I think some of us were headed that way) then who knows how horrible a compromised bill could become? Luckily, progressives and liberals, sixty and counting in the House, are galvanizing and threatening to vote against any bill that doesn't contain a public option.

So in my opinion, I don't think this was an example of Obama Kung-Fu; it was more the situation turning to fortuitously help the White House. Maybe call it Obama Kung-Fu Panda™.

It's Still Over.

posted by Armadillo Joe

In response to my rather gloomy post from yesterday, vyccan wrote:

Joe, why the early funeral when the patient is still alive? Your burying the reform this early is very depressing; it is the first time I've not been able to finish one of your posts since coming to this site a few months back. Now is not the time, IMO, to discourage - after all, there is still the opportunity to write, call, visit senators/senator's office - but to make an extra push to have one's voice heard. It is just as well that the President can't hear all the doom and gloom predictions, criticisms, etc because if he were anything like me it would be enough to make him just 'give up'. Do re-release your 'positivity', Joe, so that the positive vibes can contribute to the more favourable outcome we would like to see.

And the following was my response, which I also decided could be its own post:

As I told Carl last night, I have been wrong about Obama many times before and I will be happy to be wrong about him now.

As much as I would like to dismiss the teabagging town-hell deathers as "the fringiest of the fringe" they are not just a gaggle cornpone fringe racists acting out against an uppity, citified Yankee Nee-gro and the n**ger-lovers who voted for him. That IS what they are, but that isn't ONLY what they are. They are acting on behalf of Big Medicine (insurance, pharma, AMA, etc...) who want this bill killed, or at least fatally wounded, by any means necessary.

That's why I call them Brownshirts. Like their historical antecedents who brought down the Weimar Republic, they are not a thing in-and-of themselves to be worried about because as dangerous as any one individual may be with a gun and a sign, as a group they are a loud, loutish, unruly mob standing at street corners shouting at car windows and the camera lenses of intrepid bloggers. Under normal circumstances, left to their own devices, they would disperse at sunset to go trawling for Cheetos and PBR.

But they have corporate backing. And they are egged on by powerful, monied forces who see their interests temporarily align with those of the rabble. The wealthy have no qualms about leveraging that overlap in opposition to the Dirty Fucking Hippies to get what they need. That's what makes the "deathers" Brownshirts.

Thus, vyccan, the gloom. I've seen this play out before. In fact, my whole life. So much of the ugliness and willful stupidity in our public discourse the rest of the country has seen for the last ten or fifteen years is just the way things are done in Texas and The South. Of course it failed, "government is bad" is not an effective governing strategy. Dixie itself is something of a failed state within our own borders, but rather than grow and change and catch up to the rest of the nation in the latter half of the 20th Century -- since Brown v. Board of Education, frankly -- they found a way (via Goldwater, Nixon, Saint Ronnie & Bush43 and their congressional coalitions) to instead Dixie-fy the rest of America. To those of a certain class and social milieu in the Northeast, the Upper Midwest and the Left Coast, it all seems alien and hokey. Surely, I keep hearing people say, the American people will see these ruffians for what they are and recoil in horror, they will reject these people for their motives and tactics and truth and light will prevail, forever and ever amen.

The opportunity to recoil in horror and reject the deranged Konfederate Klown Kar of the modern GOP was ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty even forty years ago. But it was too much fun bashing hippies and slandering uppity negroes and wimmin-folk who didn't want to be barefoot and pregnant -- a tendency of violence the money-changers in the GOP temple had no qualms about turning a blind eye to because it got all those meddling kids out of the way of their nefarious plans.

These people are for real and deadly serious. Even out of power they are dangerous because their ideological devotion to The Cause gives them the political wherewithal to maim any legislation they can't outright kill.

They are still arguing about the Civil War and are still polluting our discourse with their toxic mythologies 140+ years after the fact. Don't expect them to give up on killing "Obamacare" and join the 20th Century any time soon.

Yup. It's Over.

posted by Armadillo Joe

It's all over but the crying on health-care reform.

Oh sure, some kind of reform may eventually puke forth from Congress, but smart money is on it being weak, weak tea -- easy for insurance behemoths and their enablers in government to eventually smother into either meek acquiesence or to hammer into irrelevance -- and the end result won't look much different than present day, except that reform opponents will have a whole new vocabulary with which to rhetorically bash the shiny new government health program that only helps people different-looking than Glenn Beck. They will seize upon the tiniest of shortcomings or any outright failures in the new system, elevate them to the level of Proof of the Existence of a Satanic Socialist Conspiracy to Destroy America and Baby Jesus and our celebrities pretending to be journalists on the Tee-Vee will slather American screens with pictures of indolent black people and their crying babies suffering and dying at the hands of overwhelmed and disillusioned medical professionals, after which the pundits and other assorted performing monkeys will dutifully tut-tut about how silly we ever were to think that a rich and prosperous nation such as ours could summon the economic resources and moral courage to fix something as nebulous, unknowable and (frankly) unimportant as the health of poor people.

We will still be a worse-off, shabbier and more decrepit nation for the want of something better.

As much as the rest of us all know the "death panels" are bullshit, enough dimwitted goobers out there (many of whom carry guns, natch) let themselves be worked into a frenzy by the same manipulators who sold us a bogus war in Iraq and impeached a president for a blowjob, that the end-of-life provision -- the nugget around which the GOP was able to spin a web of lies -- has been essentially yanked from the bill and the Dems appear to largely be running for cover.

Obama isn't necessarily toast, but we only get a chance like this once a generation or so. In the case of health-care, it's more like two generations because the last two attempts (Clinton's in '94 and Ted Kennedy's back in the 1970's) were doomed to failure from the start. Of course, we didn't know that at the time, but the perspective of history tells us that the rising tide of Rethugli-goon misrule over the Nixon-to-Bush43 era was in many ways irresistable.

This one was different. If I have to explain why, you should be reading other websites.

I think Obama will wind up a severely weakened president on the other side of this. Probably as much as Carter because failing to advance the central component of your campaign platform with the kind of Congressional majorities and general popularity he has enjoyed in his first nine months in office means that you are weak enough to get rolled by a bunch of loud-mouthed goons willing to shout lies, aided and abetted by a compliant and power-savvy media complex. The way they will talk about him after this debacle, especially if one considers how central a role Sarah Palin (who lost the election, BTW, so why is she still on my Tee-Vee?) played in blowing a hole in the bottom of the health-care boat, will cause the rest of the spineless Dems to scatter for cover.

Blame whoever you want, say the media didn't report the whole debate fairly and honestly, say that the GOP is run by a bunch of thugs and goons and cynical operators manipulating a horde of racist nit-wit sheople, say that Washington is a cozy little village hostile to reform and hard-wired to advance the interests of the monied ruling class over those of the electorate, say the Dems are a bunch of scaredy-cats who wouldn't know party discipline if it hit them like a baseball bat to the knees and act like abused housewives in the face of GOP bullying, say that Obama was too high-minded and too in thrall to the Cult of Bi-Partisanship, say that this is all super-secret triple-back-flip Obama Kung-Fu and the bestest health-care bill evah is just around the corner. Say whatever you damn well please about this awful smoldering wreck we see emerging before us, but at the end of the day it amounts to so much whining about how unfair Life is. Either Obama brought a knife to a gun fight or the Obama of the campaign trail -- Hope, Change, whatever -- is not the person we actually wound up putting in office with our votes. He's either weak or wiley but either way We The People lose.

I quote the ever astute John Cole:

I still contend health care reform is over. The GOP and the fringe right will just move on to something else they find “objectionable” like this absurd accusation that voluntary counselling amounted to a panel of experts determining who should and should not live, the senior citizens seem overwhelmingly content to suckle at the public teat in regards to medicare while giving everyone else the bird, the insurance industry is playing both sides, half the Democrats are spooked by their own shadows, and the other half are in bed with the FIRE sector.

It is just over. And the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. If the Republicans had majorities like the Democrats have right now, they would have abolished the IRS and the Department of Education, Bernie Madoff would be running social security, there would be an oil well in every backyard and off every inch of coast, we’d have mandatory prayer in schools, and the defense department budget would be doubled so we could have excellent adventures in Iran while we liberate Georgia from oppressive Russian rule. And we’d be doing it all with a top marginal rate of 3%.

Hopey, Changey

posted by Armadillo Joe

Detainee Photos: Obama Seeks To Block Release

Not what I voted for.

That Didn't Take Long

posted by Armadillo Joe

Arlen "Spooky" Specter hasn't even been a Democrat for a week and already he's found a way to adhere (against the better interests of his new party) to the Rules of Engagement in Washington D.C., which is to say that whatever happens is good for Republicans and bad for Democrats and bi-partisanship means kicking a Dirty Fucking Hippie and voting for what the GOP High Command wants.

Besides voting against the president's agenda twice out of two possible votes, he's also gone on national television and denied pledging to be a loyal Democrat (even though he did), has an oft-stated and well-established hostility to pro-union legislation (in a largely blue-collar state) is actually rooting for the guy from the other team to prevail in Minnesota and regrets keeping a racist thug (Jeff Sessions) off the federal bench 20 years ago just because he's now a fellow Senator.

With friends like Specter, who needs Republicans? Why exactly are we glad he's in our caucus?

Spooky's an opportunistic, scheming, vote-chasing fence-sitter who always makes noise like he's going to make the wise and moral choice on any given vote in the senate, then votes for the GOP line anyway. He made it loud and clear that he is switching parties so that he can continue to be a senator, it had nothing at all to do with principle. With him, it never does. His whole political existence is about electoral expediency. In the World's Most Exclusive Club™, it is all about protecting the membership and if Specter needs to switch parties to keep his job, the other 99 (or 98, in this case) will do whatever they can to help. Look at what the national Dems did for LIEber-douche in Connecticut when the state Democratic party rejected him.

If the Obama team had a lick of sense about how to handle this toad (or if Harry Reid had any cojones), they'll threaten him into shutting up, falling in line and being a reliable vote for the president's agenda or face a well-financed primary challenge... then finance a primary challenge anyway. He's served his purpose by embarrassing the Senate GOP caucus, now squeeze him and make him behave or dump him. We don't need Arlen Specter. That seat does not belong to him, it belongs to the good people of Pennsylvania who deserve to send whoever best looks after their interests. In his heart of hearts, that is why he wants Coleman to prevail in Minnesota, for the same reason all those other senators wanted LIEber-douche to prevail in 2006: because they are chummy-chummy in their comfy little club and any means necessary to protect each other (regardless of party) will be taken and exploited. He really thinks that seat belongs to him personally and if he has to wear a different colored tie or part his hair differently or switch political parties to keep it, fine. Arlen Specter will only look after the interests of Arlen Specter.

This all better be some kind of Obama Kung-Fu, because as much fun as it was seeing the GOP lose its collective freaking mind over the weekend, the blush has already worn off and Arlen Specter needs to become Progressive Enemy #1. Until he's gone from the Senate, I ain't giving a dime to the DNC. I'm sending money to whoever announces a primary challenge from Specter's left.

Arlen Specter is, as ever, an unfulfilled promise, a "dependable" vote, just not ever when it really matters, when all that is good and righteous and just and the very future of humanity hangs in the balance. Now, because he has a "D" next to his name, he won't change his essential nature. He's going to enjoy being feted and courted to top this made-up 60-vote threshold (what happened to 51%?) the Rethugli-goons successfully imposed on the Senate in the last eight years. He's a scorpion and we frogs should be wary.

Obama Kung-Fu

by Armadillo Joe

I'm tired of reading fellow bloggers trying to defend this crap as yet another brilliant move in Obama's elaborate chess match with entrenched interests and call it what it is: hopey, changey (from Glenn Greenwald) -- bold face mine.

In the last week alone, the Obama DOJ (a) attempted to shield Bush's illegal spying programs from judicial review by (yet again) invoking the very "state secrets" argument that Democrats spent years condemning and by inventing a brand new "sovereign immunity" claim that not even the Bush administration espoused, and (b) argued that individuals abducted outside of Afghanistan by the U.S. and then "rendered" to and imprisoned in Bagram have no rights of any kind -- not even to have a hearing to contest the accusations against them -- even if they are not Afghans and were captured far away from any "battlefield." These were merely the latest -- and among the most disturbing -- in a string of episodes in which the Obama administration has explicitly claimed to possess the very presidential powers that Bush critics spent years condemning as radical, lawless and authoritarian.