You would think that even the densest of wingnuts would give the proper gravitas and respect to natural calamity. That no one would stoop so low as to turn a disaster of cataclysmic proportions into yet another self-promotional, egotistical excuse to shill their personal myopias.

Unfortunately, Rush Limbaugh and the “Reverend” Pat Robertson either didn’t get the memo about being tactful in the face of devastation…or they are just that plain racist, dimwitted, tone-deaf, blind, and generally typical right-wing asshat fuckheads.

Imagine, if you will, if it was, say, Staten Island rather than Haiti that had suffered a cataclysmic 7.0 earthquake that basically flattened even 4-story buildings, wrecked infrastructure, and basically left millions of people in utter chaos not knowing whether or not their friends or family or lovers were even alive.

I’d probably suspect that you wouldn’t be hearing any talk of blaming the victims for creating their own doom, or accusing those officials rushing over to give whatever assistance they could of playing political games.

But..when the country is Haiti, the US President is Barack Obama, and the bulk of the victims happen to be Black….well, let’s say that the temptations of some of our more racist and chauvinistic politicos and spokespersons are just a bit too much to resist.

First, to “Rev”. Pat, who has long had a fabled history of seeing pain and suffering as “God’s will” and “God’s revenge” on the victims for not living right — as in ‘not living right-wing as good, fascist fundie Christians should live”. (Remember how he amd the now departed Jerry Falwell blamed the terrorist attacks of 9-11-2001 on “atheists”, homosexuals, and “abortionists”?? Or how he basically predicted that Florida would suffer through hurricanes due to Walt Disney World’s dangerous tolerance of queers??) Yesterday on his syndicated program The 700 Club, rhe Far Right-eous Reverend decided to put his foot in it again, this time discussing why Haiti had such a horrible string of natural disasters. (That country had been devastated earlier by Hurricanes Fay, Gustav, and Ike, as well as non-tropical flooding, not to mention the aftereffects of political and ethnic strife and economic imperialism, the Duvalier dictatorship, and just being the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.)

And you know Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True Story, and so the Devil said OK it’s a deal. And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they’ve been cursed by one thing after the other desperately poor. That island is Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle. On one side is Haiti on the other side is the Dominican republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc.. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have and we meed to pray for them a great turning to god and out of this tragedy I’m optimistic something good may come.

Oh, I see….so it’s that damn Voudou (only ignorant Westerners still refer to the native magickal tradition as “voodoo”) and the foolishness of Toussaint :L’Overture in thinking that Black slaves there actually deserved to be the equal of the White man that condemns Haiti to such bad luck….but, if they would just get right with Jesus Christ, then all would be much better and they’d enjoy the prosperity of their enterprising brothers on the other side of the island. Or..so says Rev. Pat.

Of course, it would have been even pathetic even if Robertson got almost everything in his rant wrong…like, the fact that it was Napoleon Bonaparte, NOT Napoleon III, who ruled Haiti in the name of France at the time of the slave revolt. Or the fact that that “deal with the devil” not only helped that nation achieve their freedom, but ultimately greatly benefited the United States, since it was the bleeding dry of Napoleon’s troops and funds that prompted him to give up the entire Louisiana Territory — not only New Orleans and what is now the state of Louisiana, but the whole damn territory running from Canada down to the Gulf — for what would be considered as the bargin of the millenia at $10 million.

It took Haiti’s ambassador to the US to put down Rev. Pat’s senility but good.

The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC): 1-12-10 Segment with Haitian Ambassador to the US Raymond Joseph reacting to Pat Robertson’s “pact with the devil caused Haiti’s suffering” smack (via YouTube)

There’s wingnut history…and then there’s REAL history. Too bad all of Rev. Pat’s millions couldn’t get him an actual book to read other than the Old Testament.

But, at least Rev. Pat has the legitimate excuse of senility.

Rush Limbaugh, on the other hand, simply knows better…he’s just that much of a racist asshole.

Jabba the Fat-Ass Oxycontin Addict/Football Analyst decided yesterday te bring his own verbal diarrhea to the debate, using his junk box of a radio talk show to focus on Prez O’s immediate response to the tragedy, incorporating it to his usual rants of “Obama the Magic Negro attempting to play the Black community” meme and his ceaseless comparison to the response to the “Underpants Bomber” aborted attack in Detroit earlier this month.

All the quotes following are taken from Media Matters via their “Limbaugh Wire” column of yesterday.

LIMBAUGH: I want you to remember it took [Obama] three days — three days — to respond to the Christmas Day Fruit of Kaboom bomber. Three days. And when he came out after those three days, he was clearly irritated that he had to do it. He didn’t want to do it. He comes out here in less than 24 hours to speak about Haiti.

[...]

Oh, this is what he lives for. He lives for serving those in misery. Now don’t misunderstand here, folks. See, this is — I wonder — I don’t have the whole press conference, but I wonder: Did he apologize for America before acknowledging we are the only people on Earth that can possibly help them out down there in any significant way?

Oh, but let’s just compare….three days to react to an attempted plane bombing that ends up killing no one, with the offender arrested and placed in custody (and compared to the six days it took for Dubya to respond to the earlier Richard Reid “Shoe Bomber” attempt)….versus 24 hours to react to a major devastating 7.0 earthquake near the capital city of a major low-lying and heavily populated area in the Western Hemisphere, with a potential death toll moving into tens of thousands, if not the hundreds of thousands. But, hey, it’s just those shiftless nigg…..ahhh, I mean, those welfare queen and gangsta Blacks, so why should we decent conservatives give a shit…ehhhh, Rushbo??.

So, why is Obama sooooo worried about those poor folk?? Can’t be because of human empathy for suffering and cataclysmic disaster, or simply the human need to lend a hand to those in need.  Naaaah….must be something more political and nefarious afoot…like, domestic politics, maybe??

LIMBAUGH: Yes, I think in the Haiti earthquake, ladies and gentlemen — in the words of Rahm Emanuel, we have another crisis simply too good to waste. This will play right into Obama’s hands — humanitarian, compassionate. They’ll use this to burnish their — shall we say — credibility with the black community, in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community, in this country. It’s made-to-order for ‘em. That’s why he couldn’t wait to get out there. Could not wait to get out there.

Hmmmm….so actually sending our best and brightest people and resources to a country in complete chaos and disorder following a natural disaster of untold magnitude isn’t motivated by moral kindness and urgency…but plain old fashioned Machevellian realpolitick.  Yeah, right, Rush, you fuckhead, just like what Dubya and “Heck of a job” Brownie did during Hurricane Katrina. And just like Dubya did when he rushed himself to New York City to aid the victims of 9-11…oh, wait, he didn’t???

Ohh, but wait, El Rushbo’s not quite finished with this:

LIMBAUGH: That place, Haiti, has been run by dictators and communists. And how long is it gonna be, how long is it gonna be before we hear Obama and the left in this country say that what we really need to do is reinstate the communist Aristide to the leadership position down there to coordinate putting the country back together? The Haitian economy is entirely dependent on foreign aid. They produce nothing — zilch, zero, nada.

Awwww, come on, Rush….you’re not going to give Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier and the Tonton Macoutes their due for ruling Haiti with an iron fist for the benefit of United Fruit and Chiquita??  Or for doing you and your “business” allies the favor of toppling Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power (and slaughtering hundreds of thousands in the process in the name of progress and prosperity)?? And actually, putting Aristide and the people back in power would be a great idea…for later. Saving lives and getting things in some sembulance of order takes first priority right now.

But even with all that, you would think that that small, tiny smidget of a soul that wasn’t cut out of Limbaugh’s heart after his recent surgery would enable him to at least support efforts to get funds and relief to the people struggling for basic survival. Yeah, sure he would…as long as it’s not organized by the Obama White House.

LIMBAUGH: Would you trust the money’s gonna go to Haiti?

CALLER: No.

LIMBAUGH: But would you trust that your name is gonna end up on the mailing list for the Obama people to start asking you for campaign donations for him and other causes?

CALLER: Absolutely.

LIMBAUGH: Absolutely right.

CALLER: That’s the point.

LIMBAUGH: Besides, we’ve already donated to Haiti. It’s called the U.S. income tax.

Yeah…the same income tax that donates $3 BILLION a year of foreign aid to the state of Israel to maintain nuclear overkil. And I though that right-wingers like Limbaugh wanted to do away with income taxes as evil Marxism incarnate??

Blackened hearts like those that beat from Limbaugh and Robertson can only be pitied by those of us with normally functioning brain cells and morals…but the fact that these charletons are able to actually thrive and profit off other people’s sufferings and pain, and even use such as a talking point for their mockery, is just plain pathetic. But then again, this is America, where bigotry sells.

I’ll just leave Olbermann to pass the true and final consensus judgment on these fools, as only KO can.

Countdown with Keith Olbermann (MSNBC): 1/13/10 “Quick Comment” on the rantings of Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh on the Haiti calamity (via YouTube)

[Once again, this is a repost of a post I did for the old SmackChron blog in December 16th.]

Once again, I have to emerge from the basement after a brief absence to post something. Sorry about that, folks…a bit of poster’s block.

But, once again, I have to emerge to say the same four words that, unfortunately, have to be said about the entire health reform debacle now unfolding and unraveling:

I TOLD YOU SO.

I wish that I wasn’t so correct, but I’ve been saying all along that the Democrats (or, as I now refer to them, the Dimocrats) would snatch defeat from not only the jaws of victory, but the upper colon of victory by caving in to Big Business and Big Insura.

I called it correctly the minute that President Obama came out so strongly in support of Holy Joe Lieberman to keep his Democratic Caucus membership and his Homeland Committee chairmanship, even after he actively campaigned against Obama in favor of his Republican opponent (and nearly became the Republican VP nominee at John McCain’s behalf, only to be stymied by the Repub base in favor of Princess Sarah of Wassilla).

It only reenforced my prediction when Obama came out and made that deal with Billy Tauzin and the Big Pharma/Big Insura lobbyists to not require negotiation with pharmaceuticals at Medicare rates (or even Medicare + 5% rates), but rather reimburse rural doctors at “market costs”.

And, of course, every statement about how Obama would give “progressives” the option of the “public option” was followed by actions which directly underminded those statements and assured the ConservaDems in the Senate (Baucus, Bayh, Conrad, Landrieu, and Nelson, among others) to gut the PO that much more into a useless hollow shell.

And yet….even that wasn’t good enough for Holy Joe, who simply used the rope that was given him by Obama and Harry Reid to hang progressives over the cliff.

The expected and typical response of the A-list liberal blogosphere to the news that the “public option” was officially dead and the “Medicare buy-in” that would have served as the placebo to soothe their wounds won’t be offered either, was generally in the range from denial (“Write your congressman and MAKE them pass a REAL public option!!” screeched MoveOn.org) to anger at the ConservaDems and especially Lieberman for playing the Kingmaker (“Strip his ass of his committee chairmanships and boot him out of the Democratic Caucus!!!”).

But, perhaps all this was just smoke and mirrors to hide one haunting fact: this bill is EXACTLY what the Dems and Obama wanted in the first place.

And, that they were intent on first playing and then dumping the progressives all along with the “public option” myth.

I’ll just let Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com tell the sorry tale, since he does it better than I ever could:

Of all the posts I wrote this year, the one that produced the most vociferious email backlash — easily — was this one from August, which examined substantial evidence showing that, contrary to Obama’s occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it. From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House — hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama’s campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN). Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn’t pass it. The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party — rather than the GOP — will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage. Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this — the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional “centrists.” Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start — the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry. And kudos to Russ Feingold for saying so:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation. “This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” said Feingold. “I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect.”

Let’s repeat that: “This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place.” Indeed it does. There are rational, practical reasons why that might be so. If you’re interested in preserving and expanding political power, then, all other things being equal, it’s better to have the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry on your side than opposed to you. Or perhaps they calculated from the start that this was the best bill they could get. The wisdom of that rationale can be debated, but depicting Obama as the impotent progressive victim here of recalcitrant, corrupt centrists is really too much to bear.

Or, to put it another way: Democrats punk the Left….AGAIN. As they always have. As they always will.

Did you really think that an adminstration with attitudes like this would actually pass meaningful progressive reform??

“I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,” said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We’ve gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don’t understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform.” – quoted from a Washington Post 8/19/09 article, via Greenwald

Not just “the left”, mind you…but “the left of the left”…as if actually providing decent health care to everyone and removing the incentives for price gouging from private insurance was nothing less than a Communist/Socialist plot to undermine Americanism. And remember, this isn’t a Teabagger saying this, but a top Obama admin spokesperson (maybe even Rahm Emmanuel in abstensia).

And as for the silly notion that Lieberman will be punished for his treachery in opposing his own caucus on HCR: Oh, silly people, don’t you ever learn?? Punishment doesn’t apply to conservative/”centrist”/right-wing Democrats, they just do whatever the hell they want. If there is any retribution that will be wielded out in this debate, it will come from the White House….against the progressive Democrats who attempt to maintain what’s left of their shattered principles and oppose this mountain of crap disguised as Health Care Reform. That’s how it always is in the House of Representatives…the liberals get rolled, and then they get rolled again, and then they are threatened with loss of privileges and pork if they resist their geting rolled. Again, I quote Greenwald:

Indeed, we’ve seen before what the White House can do — and does do — when they actually care about pressuring members of Congress to support something they genuinely want passed. When FDL and other liberal blogs led an effort to defeat Obama’s war funding bill back in June, the White House became desperate for votes, and here is what they apparently did (though they deny it):

The White House is playing hardball with Democrats who intend to vote against the supplemental war spending bill, threatening freshmen who oppose it that they won’t get help with reelection and will be cut off from the White House, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) said Friday. “We’re not going to help you. You’ll never hear from us again,” Woolsey said the White House is telling freshmen.

That’s what the White House can do when they actually care about pressuring someone to vote the way they want. Why didn’t they do any of that to the “centrists” who were supposedly obstructing what they wanted on health care? Why didn’t they tell Blanche Lincoln — in a desperate fight for her political life — that she would “never hear from them again,” and would lose DNC and other Democratic institutional support, if she filibustered the public option? Why haven’t they threatened to remove Joe Lieberman’s cherished Homeland Security Chairmanship if he’s been sabotaging the President’s agenda? Why hasn’t the President been rhetorically pressuring Senators to support the public option and Medicare buy-in, or taking any of the other steps outlined here by Adam Green? There’s no guarantee that it would have worked — Obama is not omnipotent and he can’t always control Congressional outcomes — but the lack of any such efforts is extremely telling about what the White House really wanted here.

And also remember that Obama backed Blue Dog conservative Democrats over the more progressive Dems even when the progressive Dems were more popular (as in the case with congressional districts in Georgia and Louisiana).

So…the $64 question is now: What should we do now?? Should we accept whe inevitable giveaway bailout bill that will result as merely a tiny step forward in health care reform?? Or…should progs move to kill the whole process and start from scratch??

Before today, my opinion was unabashedly in the “Kill this Bill!!!!” group, with the caveat to start over next year with single payer and national health service as the foundation for a new effort. Having seen the handwriting on the wall and the total inability of the Dimocrats to even unite in shared fear over not passing health care, or to rush to pass whatever crap sandwich counts for “reform” however, my opinion has changed to the “Whatever” category.

More than likely, the Senate bill will become the main bill (especially if rumors are true that Obama will force the House to accept the Senate version with an up-or-down vote without any conference committee to intervene, and if the Senate buzzards are allowed to fly in and include ever worse amendments, such as a stricter anti-abortion requirement or a residency requirement for involvement in the “exchanges”, or more pork funding for “faith based initiatives’ or other forms of right-wing social engineering, designed to get the ConservaDems and “moderate” Reps like Snowe and Collins online). Then Obama will do as he did yesterday and officially endose the process, and then he and Rahm will lean heavily on the liberals to either shut the hell up and get in line behind “the best chance of passing meaningful health care reform” or oppose th entire bill on principle and risk getting the full wrath of the Village media for torpedoing HCR through their “left of the left” extremism and their “Cheetos and pajamas-wearing” blog overenthusiasm. The threat of the loss of money for reelection and pork projects should be enough to keep enough of them in line for this monstrosity to finally pass.

The Prez gets his Christmas Eve Rose Garden signing ceremony with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid on hand holding back crocodile tears of joy; Big Insura and Big Business get to chink their champagne glasses in dodging a political nuke and scoring a huge payday of coerced customers to fleece even more….and the Left and regular folks are once again left to sputter and ponder what the hell just happened.

And…everyone gets to prepare for an even bigger swindle and heist upcoming for 2011 or so….this time, of Social Security and Medicare on behalf of Big Business in the name of “deficit reduction”.

Change you can believe in…mighty grand, isn’t it??

And you wonder why I voted for Cynthia McKinney and the Greens in 2008??

And yeah, I shed a tear or two when Obama was announced the winner, because it’s still nice to have a person of color in charge, and because even a puppet would be better than having Dubya and the GOP for another term, heaven forbid having Quitter Spice and JohnnyMac anywhere near The Button. And HELL TO THE NO, I will never say that having Princess Sarah in the White House would be an improvement in any way. Problem is, though, that with the way that the Dims are tacking pretty far to the Right and pissing away their base, it might not even matter much anymore; the Teabaggers and Birthers may just win things by default.

All the more reason why an independent Left party and an autonomous Left of center popular movement is so sorely needed in this country right about now. The Dimocrats have basically shot their wads into the eyes of progressive Americans and shown themselves for the craven fools and liars they have always been. If there ever was an oppurtunity for a real hero to emerge to bust out of the Dimocrat ghetto and launch a true freedom movement, why not now…and why not you?? Hell, if the freakin’ New Orleans Saints have the opportunity to go unbeaten and win the Super Bowl, then anything can and will happen, right??

So…Who Dat say they gonna step up to the mic and lead the Next Left?? McKinney?? Kucinich?? Nader?? Conyers?? Sanders??.Anyone?? Who Dat???

{Note by Anthony: This was originally posted to my old SmackDog Chronicles 2.6 blog back on December 21st…but it got nuked when my old hosting company booted my former domain due to it getting hacked too many times. I was able to retrieve it, though, from my old database, and am now reposting it here for legacy sake. More of my former posts will be coming as I have time to repost them.)

(This is going to be the first part of a long series that I’m gonna post on my personal ideas on how The Left can get through this current crisis of leadership and strategic vision. It’s long, and will be a series, but have patience…it’s more than worth the read..at least, I hope so.)

A football analogy to begin this: Enjoying the most recent success of the New Orleans Saints (only temporarily derailed last Saturday night by the Cowboys, who finally decided to show up and play for a change in December…was it something Lisa Ann dropped in Tony Romo’s….Gatorade??) reminded me of some of the bad not-so-old days during the Jim Mora (Sr.) era, when the team would basically play a solid game only to lose in the end due to Mora’s tight-assed playcalling. He called it “playing not to lose”…as in, not taking shots to bury opposing teams, relying on the old standard of defense and running between the tackles…and generally being the ultraconservative Mora was. It worked pretty well…until big game/playoff time, when team after team would take advantage of such constricted playcalling to rally and break the Whodats’ hearts time and time again. And every single time after such a loss,. Mora would defend his actions with the same tired approach of “When you are playing not to lose, you are playing to win.” Ahhh, right, Coach…which is why you are celebrating the victory…not.

It also remnds me of a local sports journalist in my neck of the woods named Kevin Foote, who writes for the Lafayette Daily Advertiser; he used to be for a time the assigned beat reporter for the Saints. He, being mostly your typical South Louisiana right-winger, just loved Mora and his “run-first” philosophy; and it carried even into the early years of the Sean Payton era: during the 2006 NFC Championship game against the ultimate champions Chicago Bears, Foote, while live blogging the game for the Advertiser, was going nearly apoplexic over the fact that Payton wasn’t running the football enough for his (Foote’s) pleasure. Never mind the fact that Payton had led the Saints to the freakin’ championship game, further than any other coach had lead the damn team, through the reliance on Drew Brees’ arm and Reggie Bush’s (then healthy) fleet feet; for all that Foote cared, they should have hired Lou Holtz and ran the Wishbone or the Veer. After diehard Whodats raised serious hell about Foote’s…ummm..biases, he was reassigned to cover high school sports…now, they use AP and Gannet reporters to cover the Saints.

The point of all this?? The mentality of “runthefootballrunthefootballrunthefootbalRUNTHEFOOTBALL!!!!!” is so deeply hotwired into the mentality of certain journalists and “analysts” that it tends to cloud their analysis of what is really going on…namely that while having a nice power running game certainly helps your team in certain situations (killing the clock, resting your defense, getting around bad weather/sloppy fields), it sometimes tends to ignore the basic fact that most games are ultimately won not on the ground, but through the air…and that the ability to throw the football might be as, if not even more, important to winning as the run (and special team play). Remember, it was Ben Rostlesburger chunking it to Santonio Holmes and Hines Ward that ultimately got the Steelers home this last Super Bowl (all the notions of “running team” aside); and it was the passing game (including David Tyree’s acrobatic catch on 4th-and-whatever) that ultimately enabled the New York Football Giants to pull the upset of New England’s “Perfect Team” two years before.

So…what in all hell does this have to do with the byline of this post, you say?? Patience, Grasshopper…work with me here.

Right now, the port side of the political spectrum here in the United States of America is essentially in total chaos and stunned horrific aghast over what should have been one of their proudest moments: the first ever President of color getting a key plank of his administration through a massive stumbling block of resistance by a recalicant and isolated and increasingly despised minority bent on revenge.

It would have been so, too…if the health care reform package hadn’t been hijacked by the usual corporate interests and their sycophants in Congress and Pnesident Barack Hussein Obama’’s own party (the Democratic Party) and transformed from a nominally progressive package (the version that passed the House) to the Big Insura/Big Pharma Forced Individual Mandate equivalent of the Great Wall Street Swindle…..errrrr….Bailout (the one that just cleared “cloture” by the skin of its 60 vote teeth, with NO Republican support), only slightly sweetened with the NutraSweet of “subsidies” ..

And it would be even more of success had it not been the President himself who, after promising during his campaign that he would absolutely shake up the system and drive the moneychangers from the Temple; has seemed to have done perfect 180-degree spin and is now happly endorsing the very policies he pretended to oppose before he won the Presidency.

Now, the Prez will say that he was simply pushed to where he is now by the gangstas of the “ConservaDems” in the US Senate (namely, folk like Senate Banking Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-MT), Homeland Security Committee Chair Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and other prominent “centrist” CorporoDems like Mary Landrieu (LA) and Ben Nelson (NE), who insisted that given united and universal Republican opposition to the bill as so much “socialism” and invitation to empower “death panels” to “kill Grandma” (and their own plans to pad their pockets with Big Insura/Big Pharma largeese..and, in Nelson’s own case, to placate the National Right-to-Life Committee and the Catholic Bishops’ assault on the Roe vs. Wade landmark Supreme Court ruling allowing women the right to choose abortion as a means of terminating pregnancy), that the bill just had to be watered down to make it past the 60 vote firewall to avoid a GOP filibuster.

Yeah, he will say that…but considering the smack that is being run by his own chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel (who used to be a Democratic congressman who wielded the hammer in favor of such “centrists” against “progressives” who attempted to oppose such legislation on grounds of principle) about how only “the left of the left” would put “the perfect” ahead of passing a “good bill”, it would be more than acceptable to question that analysis and say that this monstrosity was what Obama wanted all along.

And if you add the basic fact that Obama has been enabling the likes of Lieberman even after Holy Joe got run out of the Democratic Party by Connecticut Dems (he won his reelection by switching to his own party (Connecticut for Lieberman) and openly courting Republican votes)…and even after he openly campaigned for Obama’s OPPONENT (John McCain) last presidential election and was even on the cusp of being JohnnyMac’s running mate, only to be repealed by the Rep base, who ultimately imposed Sister Sarah of Wasilla)…well, your suspicions about Prez O siding with the Neoliberal Soft Right and playing the Left for fools would be even more substaniated. (The secret deals with Billy Tauzin and the Big Pharma lobbyists to derail attempts to control costs don’t help, either.)

All of this has split what is known and loved as “Liberal Blogistan” (aka, the “Netroots”) wide-ass open, the way a nutcracker whacks pecans. On one side, are the likes of Ezra Klein of Talking Points Memo, Matt Yglesias, and Nate Silver of the stat site Fivethirtyeight.com who insist that the glass is half full and that even with the forced mandate without controls and the Big Insura raid, the increased coverage for health care and the subsidies make this bill better than passing notheng…and besides, we can’t attack our Fearless Leader since he’s simply making the best out of a bad situation brought upon by 8 years of George W. Bush. (No relation to Reggie, of course.).

On the other side, are the Fighting Liberal Brigade, featuring Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com, MoveOn.org, John Amato of CrooksandLiars.com, Digby over at Hullaballoo, John Avarosis of AmericaBlog.com, and Susie Madrak of both C&R and her own blog Surburban Guerilla, who insist that “progressives” should NOT take this rejection sitting down, and should fight like hell in the House to restore progressivity to the bill…mostly meaning either a retention of the vaunted “public option” government plan that would compete with the private plans to offer affordable health care and extend covereage to those without it, or a repeal of the hated “forced individual mandate”. The latter is also a big fan of having the Senate rewrite the bill through “reconciliation”, which would require only a simple majority vote of 50 plus Vice President Biden, to restore the more progressive aspects of the bill.

Problem for them is that on the outsides looking in are the majority of grass roots liberals (now joined by reproductive rights-backing feminists jolted by the Stupak/Nelson Amendments directly affecting abortion rights and reproductive health coverate for women) are so fed up with the whole process and Obama’s complicity, if not total collusion, in this mass swindle that they would just prefer that the whole process be yanked and started afresh next year. “Kill the Bill!!” may have started as a gimmich sloagan for the Hard Right Teabaggers, but for not a few dissenters of the Left, it’s become their rallying cry, too. More than likely, though, there is simply too much institutional backing behind this bill for it to fail; and House “progressives” have shown that they simply don’t have either the votes or the power to offer any substitutes…and Rahm could simply either buy them off with promises of pork and earmarks or threaten their reelection coffers if they raised a peep of protest.

So…now we come to Stage 2 of The Great Progressive/Liberal Reaction: past the shock of betrayal and deceit, now comes the Blame Game.

For the Loyalists, the focus for the anger would go right to the ConservaDems (Lieberman, Baucus, Nelson, Kent Conrad (SD), Landrieu, et. al.) for allowing themselves to be prostituted by Big Insura and tank meaningful reform to their beck and call; as well as the recalicant Republicans powered by the massive Astroturfing of Teabagger protests by the same health insurance companies. Primarying those traitors and replacing them with “more and better Democrats” is the default position for them.

There is a current of thought, though, that is rapidly taking over the netroots (especially in the non-A-listers) that perhaps the fire should be leveled much more at Obama himself for breaking his promises and deceiving everyone into thinking he was a true “progressive” rather than the DLC shill he was all along. Leading that charge would be, of course, the Hillary Clinton groupies who originally rallied around the “PUMA” (Party Unity, My ASS) label, and who are now crowing how they were the only ones who saw this coming from the very beginning, and that this proves that the “Obamabots” were just lemmings who allowed their banner wearer to “steal” away the 2008 nomination from the “rightful” progressive candidate. (Here’s an example of “Hillary was robbed” conspiracy theory connected to the HCRFail that is making the rounds of the blogosphere currently.) Of course, all this ignores that Hillary was as much a DLC candidate as Obama was, that more than likely, she would have travelled the same path as her husband Bill in the art of “triangulation” and punking the Left (though, as a woman, she probably would have done it with a bit different style), and that she gave as much vitrol as she got from “misogynistic” Obamabots (see Larry Johnston and “No Quarters”’s incancessant personal smears on both Obama and his wife, and Geraldine Ferraro’s historic outburst that Obama was simply playing “the race card” in using his Blackness to assault Hillary and working-class White women). But, anger and rage can cloud a lot of folk.

A more thoughtful and less partisan variant of the above, however, does exist…it comes mostly from people of the disaffected Left whom either have, like the PUMA’s, rejected Obama as a charlatan masquerading as a “progressive”…but engender a far more radical and far more institutional critique of not only Obama, but the Democratic Party’s role as part of the institution of corporate power in general. One of the better analysis comes from Bruce Dixon of the Black Leftist journal Black Agenda Report, which leaves no doubt on how they see Obama regarding his playing of Black America, but, unlike the PUMA’s and the Loyalists, are willing to take the next level and endorse far more fundamental change.

Like the Obama campaign itself, the public option was never more than a brand. It was a container designed to fit our hopes and dreams just well enough and just long enough to close the deal, an empty wrapper, with little or no candy inside. Our so-called “progressives” in Congress knew all along it was a fraud, but they played along. When “progressive” Democrats were drawing lines in the sand and “fighting for the public option” all spring and summer and fall, they told us it was this humungous public entity that would be open to hundreds of millions, to anybody wanting an alternative to private insurance, and that it would compete with and force the price of private insurance downward. Howard Dean said we should think of the public option as Medicare, only for everybody.

This kind of “public option” was a transparent hoax, as the wonderful blog of PNHP, Physicians for a National Health Plan pointed out last spring. A great candy wrapper.

When the House bill finally passed, and when the outlines of the Senate bill began to emerge, the same progressive congresspeople and commentators told us the public option they had lost was such an itty bitty thing that it didn’t matter much, and anyhow they were going to expand Medicare, so wasn’t that a “public option,” only better? Of course their version of expanding Medicare was not free medical care with dignity. It would allow only those with very low incomes, no other insurance and no other choices to “buy into” a means-tested, ghettoized version of Medicare. Essentially, since they had cheapened their own brand, the “public option,” beyond redemption they sought to confuse it in the public mind with Medicare, which had more credibility.

Extending Medicare would be a great idea. But it’s not Medicare if you have to buy into it, or if you are only qualified by your income being low enough. Adding that group to the Medicare pool, a group that tends to be sicker and poorer, would unbalance and destabilize Medicare, while leaving the healthiest and best and most profitable people to the private insurers. Furthermore, as Dr. Steffie Woolhandler of PNHP points out, this is a place where incrementalism makes it harder to get results, not easier. Disrupting the Medicare and private markets to admit people 55 and over this year, 50 and under five years or some time later, are all separate disruptions. It would be cheaper and easier to do it once. But Medicare, absent the Bush-era partial privatizations, really IS single payer, and therefore was never on the table. That would be too much like real candy, when our betters never intended to serve us more than the wrapper. The brand. (excerpted from BlackAgendaReport.com” href=”http://tns1.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/universal-health-care-we-keep-candy-you-can-have-wrapper-no-wait-give-us-wrapper-too”>here)

Then, you have the professional health care radicals, such as Kip Sullivan of Physicans for a National Health Program, who simply gawked at the way in which the “public option” (later reduced to the “Medicare buy-in”) was methodically throttled down and sliced and diced into pieces in spite of White House and “progressive” Democratic claims of support, while programs like universal single payer and “Medicare for All” which would have far more directly met the challenge (but would have directly threatened the Holy Grail of private profits and privatized health care) were simply ignored with the wringing of hands. Sullivan’s seminal essay for PNHP on the “bait and switch” tactics of how the “public option” was originally concieved, how it morphed into the complex clusterfuck as it moved through the House, and how it ultimately was sliced to death in the Senate appears here. Sullivan’s warnings back in June that the House plan — the one that was originally introduced, which ultimately was shredded to its core before it even passed the House by both the Blue Dog conservatives (aka, House “centrists”) and the Obama Adminstation’s crooked and cooked back door deals with Big Pharma — would even then be woefully inadequate for the task at hand seem like a decade ago in context [bracket portions added by me for emphasis]:

The first mistake was to think that a “public option” that merely took over a large chunk of the non-elderly market (as opposed to one that took over the entire market) could substantially reduce health care costs and thereby make universal coverage politically feasible. Any proposal that leaves in place a multiple-payer system — even a multiple-payer system with a large government-run program in the middle of it — is going to save very little money. Even if Hacker’s original Health Care for America Plan had taken over half the non-elderly market and then reached homeostasis (something Hacker swore up and down it would do), the savings would have been relatively small. The reason for that is twofold. First, any insurance program, public or private, that has to compete with other insurers is going to have overhead costs substantially higher than Medicare’s. (It is precisely because Medicare is a single-payer program that its overhead costs are low.) Second, the multiple-payer system Hacker would leave in place would continue to impose unnecessarily large overhead costs on providers.

The second mistake the “public option” movement made was to think the insurance industry and the right wing would treat a “public option” more gently than a single-payer. Conservatives have a long history of treating small incremental proposals such as “comparative effectiveness research” as the equivalent of “a government takeover of the health care system.” It should have been no surprise to anyone that conservatives would shriek “socialism!” at the sight of the “public option,” even the mouse model proposed by the [liberal/"progressive"] Democrats.

The bait-and-switch strategy adopted by the “public option” movement has put the [liberal/"progressive"] Democrats in a terrible quandary. Seduced by the false advertising about the potency of the “public option” to lower costs, [liberal/"progressive"] Democrats have raised public expectations for reform to unprecedented levels. Failing to meet those expectations during the 2009 session of Congress, which is inevitable if the [liberal/"progressive"] Democrats continue to promote legislation like the bills released in June, is going to have unpleasant consequences. Is there no way out of this quandary?

In short, from a political standpoint, the strategy of appeasing the “center” to sell a liberal/”progressive” policy in the face of right-wing hysteria turned out as it always has and always will: a collosal failure, since there simply weren’t enough committed progressives or liberals in power to counterbalance the monolith of corporate “centrists”, let alone the Teabagger-dominated GOP Right…and no moral lectures, no fire-breathing “Special Comments” from Keith Olbermann or painstaking analysis/Schoolhouse Rock skits of Rachel Maddow would be nearly enough to budge the gravy train of corporate Dems dependent on Big Insura contributions for their political survival. Especially if they had the full support of the White House for political cover.

Indeed, the result of such horrendous duplicity and collusion (and the complimentary strategy of the Repubs of washing their hands of the process and faking opposition to the “forced mandate” on ideological grounds to please the Teabagger/Birther crowd) is that the “progressive” Democrats are now forced to basically own the resulting monstrosity of a bill all to themselves, only to be scapegoated either for creating the whole thing or voting against “the best chance for reforn in a generation”. Meanwhile, the GOP can simply sit back and wait for the inevitable backlash once the actual impact kicks in of using Big Guviment to force middle- and working-class consumers to buy private health insurance that doesn’t even come close to affordability under threat of fine, jail, or garnishment by the hated IRS, supplemented by “subsidies” that don’t even come close to bridging the affordability gap and probably will be greatly truncated if not removed entirely in the name of defecit reduction or “entitlement reform” (meaning the continuing privatization of Social Security and Medicare through Health Savings Accounts and Medicare Advantage, which is the next great “centrist” campaign). And remember, all this is from Obama and the Dem “establishment”, not the Newt Gingrich/Sarah Palin/Michelle Bachmann Republicans, who will more than likely exploit the breach to revive old Reaganisms about “unleahing the free market” and restoring “freedom” and “choice” from the evil eyes of “socialized government” and the undeserving, nonproductive, “shiftless” lazy deadbeats represented in their minds and attack ads and FOX News/Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh-led jeremiads by poor Blacks, (“gangsta thugs”), Latin@s (“illegal aliens”), poor women (“baby killing sluts/whores led by radical ‘feminazis’)…all empowered by the Great ACORN Leftist/Muslim/Homosexual Conspiracy to destroy (White) Christian America by demography.

The main hope for Obama and the “centrists” is that either the threat of a Sarah Palin/Dick Cheney/Glenn Beck/Orly Taitz Presidency/Congress in 2010 /2012 having The Button in their hands and making even the extremism and right-wing lunacy of the Dubya-Tom DeLay-David Vitter years sound moderate in comparison keeps enough of the liberal/progressive “base” of the Dem party in line to settle for DLC “moderation” as a safety valve…or that the more whacked out wing of the Teabaggers and Brithers and Nativists so overwhelm the GOP (or split it wide open through a third party effort) so that enough “moderate” Repubs run to the Dems in total disgust to make up for the loss of the liberals.

Considering that most polls don’t take the Repubs too kindly, with ratings sliding into the low 20’s favorables (and Palin’s unfavorable ratings remaining in the upper 50’s), they might be right…but the game of the GOP has always been to ignore the ratings and the “liberal” media and use Fixed Noise, Limbaugh, and Beck (and the Teabagger and Christian Right local networks that has served the Right well during the Reagan years) to bypass the polls and make their own reality. With the threatened retraction of the Dem popular base, it does give them much more of a chance.

And, it just might be that the Dem leadership (especially the ConservaDems and Rahm Emanuel and the DLC 2.0 political jocks) and their financial pimps really don’t care if the Repubs do take over for a while…all the better to punk the liberals and regain the hegemony they have enjoyed in the party since Biubba Clinton took over and remake the Dems in their own corporatist image. The notion of a sweet lobbyist job awaiting them when they leave isn’t hurting their hearts, either…Republicans were able to take over in 1994 in large part because of a round of conservative Democratic retirements in “swing districts”.

What does all this mean for those of us on the Left who wish to fight all this??? That’ll be my subject for Part 2. To come soon….

(This is going to be the first part of a long series that I’m gonna post on my personal ideas on how The Left can get through this current crisis of leadership and strategic vision. It’s long, and will be a series, but have patience…it’s more than worth the read..at least, I hope so.)

A football analogy to begin this:

Enjoying the most recent success of the New Orleans Saints (only temporarily derailed last Saturday night by the Cowboys, who finally decided to show up and play for a change in December…was it something Lisa Ann dropped in Tony Romo’s….Gatorade??) reminded me of some of the bad not-so-old days during the Jim Mora (Sr.) era, when the team would basically play a solid game only to lose in the end due to Mora’s tight-assed playcalling. He called it “playing not to lose”…as in, not taking shots to bury opposing teams, relying on the old standard of defense and running between the tackles…and generally being the ultraconservative Mora was. It worked pretty well…until big game/playoff time, when team after team would take advantage of such constricted playcalling to rally and break the Whodats’ hearts time and time again. And every single time after such a loss,. Mora would defend his actions with the same tired approach of “When you are playing not to lose, you are playing to win.” Ahhh, right, Coach…which is why you are celebrating the victory…not.

It also remnds me of a local sports journalist in my neck of the woods named Kevin Foote, who writes for the Lafayette Daily Advertiser; he used to be for a time the assigned beat reporter for the Saints. He, being mostly your typical South Louisiana right-winger, just loved Mora and his “run-first” philosophy; and it carried even into the early years of the Sean Payton era: during the 2006 NFC Championship game against the ultimate champions Chicago Bears, Foote, while live blogging the game for the Advertiser, was going nearly apoplexic over the fact that Payton wasn’t running the football enough for his (Foote’s) pleasure. Never mind the fact that Payton had led the Saints to the freakin’ championship game, further than any other coach had lead the damn team, through the reliance on Drew Brees’ arm and Reggie Bush’s (then healthy) fleet feet; for all that Foote cared, they should have hired Lou Holtz and ran the Wishbone or the Veer. After diehard Whodats raised serious hell about Foote’s…ummm..biases, he was reassigned to cover high school sports…now, they use AP and Gannet reporters to cover the Saints.

The point of all this?? The mentality of “runthefootballrunthefootballrunthefootbalRUNTHEFOOTBALL!!!!!” is so deeply hotwired into the mentality of certain journalists and “analysts” that it tends to cloud their analysis of what is really going on…namely that while having a nice power running game certainly helps your team in certain situations (killing the clock, resting your defense, getting around bad weather/sloppy fields), it sometimes tends to ignore the basic fact that most games are ultimately won not on the ground, but through the air…and that the ability to throw the football might be as, if not even more, important to winning as the run (and special team play). Remember, it was Ben Rostlesburger chunking it to Santonio Holmes and Hines Ward that ultimately got the Steelers home this last Super Bowl (all the notions of “running team” aside); and it was the passing game (including David Tyree’s acrobatic catch on 4th-and-whatever) that ultimately enabled the New York Football Giants to pull the upset of New England’s “Perfect Team” two years before.

So…what in all hell does this have to do with the byline of this post, you say?? Patience, Grasshopper…work with me here.

Right now, the port side of the political spectrum here in the United States of America is essentially in total chaos and stunned horrific aghast over what should have been one of their proudest moments: the first ever President of color getting a key plank of his administration through a massive stumbling block of resistance by a recalicant and isolated and increasingly despised minority bent on revenge.

It would have been so, too…if the health care reform package hadn’t been hijacked by the usual corporate interests and their sycophants in Congress and Pnesident Barack Hussein Obama’’s own party (the Democratic Party) and transformed from a nominally progressive package (the version that passed the House) to the Big Insura/Big Pharma Forced Individual Mandate equivalent of the Great Wall Street Swindle…..errrrr….Bailout (the one that just cleared “cloture” by the skin of its 60 vote teeth, with NO Republican support), only slightly sweetened with the NutraSweet of “subsidies” ..

And it would be even more of success had it not been the President himself who, after promising during his campaign that he would absolutely shake up the system and drive the moneychangers from the Temple; has seemed to have done perfect 180-degree spin and is now happly endorsing the very policies he pretended to oppose before he won the Presidency.

Now, the Prez will say that he was simply pushed to where he is now by the gangstas of the “ConservaDems” in the US Senate (namely, folk like Senate Banking Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-MT), Homeland Security Committee Chair Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and other prominent “centrist” CorporoDems like Mary Landrieu (LA) and Ben Nelson (NE), who insisted that given united and universal Republican opposition to the bill as so much “soicialism” and invitation to empower “death panels” to “kill Grandma” (and their own plans to pad their pockets with Big Insura/Big Pharma largeese..and, in Nelson’s own case, to placate the National Right-to-Life Committee and the Catholic Bishops’ assault on the Roe vs. Wade landmark Supreme Court ruling allowing women the right to choose abortion as a means of terminating pregnancy), that the bill just had to be watered down to make it past the 60 vote firewall to avoid a GOP filibuster.

Yeah, he will say that…but considering the smack that is being run by his own chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel (who used to be a Democratic congressman who wielded the hammer in favor of such “centrists” against “progressives” who attempted to oppose such legislation on grounds of principle) about how only “the left of the left” would put “the perfect” ahead of passing a “good bill”, it would be more than acceptable to question that analysis and say that this monstrosity was what Obama wanted all along. And if you add the basic fact that Obama has been enabling the likes of Lieberman even after Holy Joe got run out of the Democratic Party by Connecticut Dems (he won his reelection by switching to his own party (Connecticut for Lieberman) and openly courting Republican votes)…and even after he openly campaigned for Obama’s OPPONENT (John McCain) last presidential election and was even on the cusp of being JohnnyMac’s running mate, only to be repealed by the Rep base, who ultimately imposed Sister Sarah of Wasilla)…well, your suspicions about Prez O siding with the Neoliberal Soft Right and playing the Left for fools would be even more substaniated. (The secret deals with Billy Tauzin and the Big Pharma lobbyists to derail attempts to control costs don’t help, either.)

All of this has split what is known and loved as “Liberal Blogistan” (aka, the Netroots) wide-ass open, the way a nutcracker whacks pecans. On one side, are the likes of Ezra Klein of Talking Points Memo, Matt Yglesias, and Nate Silver of the stat site Fivethirtyeight.com who insist that the glass is half full and that even with the forced mandate without controls and the Big Insura raid, the increased coverage for health care and the subsidies make this bill better than passing notheng…and besides, we can’t attack our Fearless Leader since he’s simply making the best out of a bad situation brought upon by 8 years of George W. Bush. (No relation to Reggie, of course.).

On the other side, are the Fighting Liberal Brigade, featuring Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com, MoveOn.org, John Amato of CrooksandLiars.com, Digby over at Hullaballoo, John Avarosis of AmericaBlog.com, and Susie Madrak of both C&R and her own blog Surburban Guerilla, who insist that “progressives” should NOT take this rejection sitting down, and should fight like hell in the House to restore progressivity to the bill…mostly meaning either a retention of the vaunted “public option” government plan that would compete with the private plans to offer affordable health care and extend covereage to those without it, or a repeal of the hated “forced individual mandate”. The latter is also a big fan of having the Senate rewrite the bill through “reconciliation”, which would require only a simple majority vote of 50 plus Vice President Biden, to restore the more progressive aspects of the bill.

Problem for them is that on the outsides looking in are the majority of grass roots liberals (now joined by reproductive rights-backing feminists jolted by the Stupak/Nelson Amendments directly affecting abortion rights and reproductive health coverate for women) are so fed up with the whole process and Obama’s complicity, if not total collusion, in this mass swindle that they would just prefer that the whole process be yanked and started afresh next year. “Kill the Bill!!” may have started as a gimmich sloagan for the Hard Right Teabaggers, but for not a few dissenters of the Left, it’s become their rallying cry, too. More than likely, though, there is simply too much institutional backing behind this bill for it to fail; and House “progressives” have shown that they simply don’t have either the votes or the power to offer any substitutes…and Rahm could simply either buy them off with promises of pork and earmarks or threaten their reelection coffers if they raised a peep of protest.

So…now we come to Stage 2 of The Great Progressive/Liberal Reaction: past the shock of betrayal and deceit, now comes the Blame Game.

For the Loyalists, the focus for the anger would go right to the ConservaDems (Lieberman, Baucus, Nelson, Kent Conrad (SD), Landrieu, et. al.) for allowing themselves to be prostituted by Big Insura and tank meaningful reform to their beck and call; as well as the recalicant Republicans powered by the massive Astroturfing of Teabagger protests by the same health insurance companies. Primarying those traitors and replacing them with “more and better Democrats” is the default position for them.

There is a current of thought, though, that is rapidly taking over the netroots (especially in the non-A-listers) that perhaps the fire should be leveled much more at Obama himself for breaking his promises and deceiving everyone into thinking he was a true “progressive” rather than the DLC shill he was all along. Leading that charge would be, of course, the Hillary Clinton groupies who originally rallied around the “PUMA” (Party Unity, My ASS) label, and who are now crowing how they were the only ones who saw this coming from the very beginning, and that this proves that the “Obamabots” were just lemmings who allowed their banner wearer to “steal” away the 2008 nomination from the “rightful” progressive candidate. (Here’s an example of “Hillary was robbed” conspiracy theory connected to the HCRFail that is making the rounds of the blogosphere currently.) Of course, all this ignores that Hillary was as much a DLC candidate as Obama was, that more than likely, she would have travelled the same path as her husband Bill in the art of “triangulation” and punking the Left (though, as a woman, she probably would have done it with a bit different style), and that she gave as much vitrol as she got from “misogynistic” Obamabots (see Larry Johnston and “No Quarters”’s incancessant personal smears on both Obama and his wife, and Geraldine Ferraro’s historic outburst that Obama was simply playing “the race card” in using his Blackness to assault Hillary and working-class White women). But, anger and rage can cloud a lot of folk.

A more thoughtful and less partisan variant of the above, however, does exist…it comes mostly from people of the disaffected Left whom either have, like the PUMA’s, rejected Obama as a charlatan masquerading as a “progressive”…but engender a far more radical and far more institutional critique of not only Obama, but the Democratic Party’s role as part of the institution of corporate power in general. One of the better analysis comes from Bruce Dixon of the Black Leftist journal Black Agenda Report, which leaves no doubt on how they see Obama regarding his playing of Black America, but, unlike the PUMA’s and the Loyalists, are willing to take the next level and endorse far more fundamental change.

Like the Obama campaign itself, the public option was never more than a brand. It was a container designed to fit our hopes and dreams just well enough and just long enough to close the deal, an empty wrapper, with little or no candy inside. Our so-called “progressives” in Congress knew all along it was a fraud, but they played along. When “progressive” Democrats were drawing lines in the sand and “fighting for the public option” all spring and summer and fall, they told us it was this humungous public entity that would be open to hundreds of millions, to anybody wanting an alternative to private insurance, and that it would compete with and force the price of private insurance downward. Howard Dean said we should think of the public option as Medicare, only for everybody.

This kind of “public option” was a transparent hoax, as the wonderful blog of PNHP, Physicians for a National Health Plan pointed out last spring. A great candy wrapper.

When the House bill finally passed, and when the outlines of the Senate bill began to emerge, the same progressive congresspeople and commentators told us the public option they had lost was such an itty bitty thing that it didn’t matter much, and anyhow they were going to expand Medicare, so wasn’t that a “public option,” only better? Of course their version of expanding Medicare was not free medical care with dignity. It would allow only those with very low incomes, no other insurance and no other choices to “buy into” a means-tested, ghettoized version of Medicare. Essentially, since they had cheapened their own brand, the “public option,” beyond redemption they sought to confuse it in the public mind with Medicare, which had more credibility.

Extending Medicare would be a great idea. But it’s not Medicare if you have to buy into it, or if you are only qualified by your income being low enough. Adding that group to the Medicare pool, a group that tends to be sicker and poorer, would unbalance and destabilize Medicare, while leaving the healthiest and best and most profitable people to the private insurers. Furthermore, as Dr. Steffie Woolhandler of PNHP points out, this is a place where incrementalism makes it harder to get results, not easier. Disrupting the Medicare and private markets to admit people 55 and over this year, 50 and under five years or some time later, are all separate disruptions. It would be cheaper and easier to do it once. But Medicare, absent the Bush-era partial privatizations, really IS single payer, and therefore was never on the table. That would be too much like real candy, when our betters never intended to serve us more than the wrapper. The brand. (excerpted from BlackAgendaReport.com article)

Then you have the professional health care radicals, such as Kip Sullivan of Physicans for a National Health Program, who simply gawked at the way in which the “public option” (later reduced to the “Medicare buy-in”) was methodically throttled down and sliced and diced into pieces in spite of White House and “progressive” Democratic claims of support, while programs like universal single payer and “Medicare for All” which would have far more directly met the challenge (but would have directly threatened the Holy Grail of private profits and privatized health care) were simply ignored with the wringing of hands. Sullivan’s seminal essay for PNHP on the “bait and switch” tactics of how the “public option” was originally concieved, how it morphed into the complex clusterfuck as it moved through the House, and how it ultimately was sliced to death in the Senate appears here. Sullivan’s warnings back in June that the House plan — the one that was originally introduced, which ultimately was shredded to its core before it even passed the House by both the Blue Dog conservatives (aka, House “centrists”) and the Obama Adminstation’s crooked and cooked back door deals with Big Pharma — would even then be woefully inadequate for the task at hand seem like a decade ago in context [bracket portions added by me for emphasis]:

The first mistake was to think that a “public option” that merely took over a large chunk of the non-elderly market (as opposed to one that took over the entire market) could substantially reduce health care costs and thereby make universal coverage politically feasible. Any proposal that leaves in place a multiple-payer system — even a multiple-payer system with a large government-run program in the middle of it — is going to save very little money. Even if Hacker’s original Health Care for America Plan had taken over half the non-elderly market and then reached homeostasis (something Hacker swore up and down it would do), the savings would have been relatively small. The reason for that is twofold. First, any insurance program, public or private, that has to compete with other insurers is going to have overhead costs substantially higher than Medicare’s. (It is precisely because Medicare is a single-payer program that its overhead costs are low.) Second, the multiple-payer system Hacker would leave in place would continue to impose unnecessarily large overhead costs on providers.

The second mistake the “public option” movement made was to think the insurance industry and the right wing would treat a “public option” more gently than a single-payer. Conservatives have a long history of treating small incremental proposals such as “comparative effectiveness research” as the equivalent of “a government takeover of the health care system.” It should have been no surprise to anyone that conservatives would shriek “socialism!” at the sight of the “public option,” even the mouse model proposed by the [liberal/"progressive"] Democrats.

The bait-and-switch strategy adopted by the “public option” movement has put the [liberal/"progressive"] Democrats in a terrible quandary. Seduced by the false advertising about the potency of the “public option” to lower costs, [liberal/"progressive"] Democrats have raised public expectations for reform to unprecedented levels. Failing to meet those expectations during the 2009 session of Congress, which is inevitable if the [liberal/"progressive"] Democrats continue to promote legislation like the bills released in June, is going to have unpleasant consequences. Is there no way out of this quandary?

In short, from a political standpoint, the strategy of appeasing the “center” to sell a liberal/”progressive” policy in the face of right-wing hysteria turned out as it always has and always will: a collosal failure, since there simply weren’t enough committed progressives or liberals in power to counterbalance the monolith of corporate “centrists”, let alone the Teabagger-dominated GOP Right…and no moral lectures, no fire-breathing “Special Comments” of Keith Olbermann or painstaking analysis/Schoolhouse Rock skits of Rachel Maddow would be nearly enough to budge the gravy train of corporate Dems dependent on Big Insura contributions for their political survival. Especially if they had the full support of the White House for political cover.

Indeed, the result of such horrendous duplicity and collusion (and the complimentary strategy of the Repubs of washing their hands of the process and faking opposition to the “forced mandate” on ideological grounds to please the Teabagger/Birther crowd) is that the “progressive” Democrats are now forced to basically own the resulting monstrosity of a bill all to themselves, only to be scapegoated either for creating the whole thing or voting against “the best chance for reforn in a generation”. Meanwhile, the GOP can simply sit back and wait for the inevitable backlash once the actual impact kicks in of using Big Guviment to force middle- and working-class consumers to buy private health insurance that doesn’t even come close to affordability under threat of fine, jail, or garnishment by the hated IRS, supplemented by “subsidies” that don’t even come close to bridging the affordability gap and probably will be greatly truncated if not removed entirely in the name of defecit reduction or “entitlement reform” (meaning the continuing privatization of Social Security and Medicare through Health Savings Accounts and Medicare Advantage, which is the next great “centrist” campaign).

And remember, all this is from Obama and the Dem “establishment”, not the Newt Gingrich/Sarah Palin/Michelle Bachmann Republicans, who will more than likely exploit the breach to revive old Reaganisms about “unleahing the free market” and restoring “freedom” and “choice” from the evil eyes of “socialized government” and the undeserving, nonproductive, “shiftless” lazy deadbeats represented in their minds and attack ads and FOX News/Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh-led jeremiads by poor Blacks, (“gangsta thugs”), Latin@s (“illegal aliens”), poor women (“baby killing sluts/whores led by radical ‘feminazis’)…all empowered by the Great ACORN Leftist/Muslim/Homosexual Conspiracy to destroy (White) Christian America by demography.

The main hope for Obama and the “centrists” is that either the threat of a Sarah Palin/Dick Cheney/Glenn Beck/Orly Taitz Presidency/Congress in 2010 /2012 having The Button in their hands and making even the extremism and right-wing lunacy of the Dubya-Tom DeLay-David Vitter years sound moderate in comparison keeps enough of the liberal/progressive “base” of the Dem party in line to settle for DLC “moderation” as a safety valve…or that the more whacked out wing of the Teabaggers and Brithers and Nativists so overwhelm the GOP (or split it wide open through a third party effort) so that enough “moderate” Repubs run to the Dems in total disgust to make up for the loss of the liberals. Considering that most polls don’t take the Repubs too kindly, with ratings sliding into the low 20’s favorables (and Palin’s unfavorable ratings remaining in the upper 50’s), they might be right…but the game of the GOP has always been to ignore the ratings and the “liberal” media and use Fixed Noise, Limbaugh, and Beck (and the Teabagger and Christian Right local networks that has served the Right well during the Reagan years) to bypass the polls and make their own reality. With the threatened retraction of the Dem popular base, it does give them much more of a chance.

And, it just might be that the Dem leadership (especially the ConservaDems and Rahm Emanuel and the DLC 2.0 political jocks) and their financial pimps really don’t care if the Repubs do take over for a while…all the better to punk the liberals and regain the hegemony they have enjoyed in the party since Biubba Clinton took over and remake the Dems in their own corporatist image. The notion of a sweet lobbyist job awaiting them when they leave isn’t hurting their hearts, either…Republicans were able to take over in 1994 in large part because of a round of conservative Democratic retirements in “swing districts”.

What does all this mean for those of us on the Left who wish to fight all this??? That’ll be my subject for Part 2. To come soon….