As predicted yesterday, everybody's ready to a) claim the Coakley loss was due to a too liberal Democrat party, and b) take it as a sign that we have to back off even further on healthcare "reform" because, you know, WE'VE ONLY GOT 59 VOTES!
And so the next stages of both the healthcare kabuki and the disemboweling of what's left of the Democratic party begin on the same day with the same idiot excuse.
First, President Obama, leader of the GOP-controlled Bipartisan Movement (an only slightly different version of the BM you first thought of), wasted no time whatsoever surrendering to to Mr Brown's exotic fantasies of corporatist theocracy and trucking.
Chastened by the Democratic Senate loss in Massachusetts, President Barack Obama and congressional allies signaled Wednesday they will try to scale back his sweeping health care overhaul in an effort to at least keep parts of it alive.
A simpler, less ambitious bill emerged as an alternative only hours after the loss of the party's crucial 60th Senate seat forced the Democrats to slow their all-out drive to pass Obama's signature legislation despite fierce Republican opposition. The Democrats are now considering all options.
No decisions have been made, lawmakers said, but they laid out a new approach that could still include these provisions: limiting the ability of insurance companies to deny coverage to people with medical problems, allowing young adults to stay on their parents' policies, helping small businesses and low-income people pay premiums and changing Medicare to encourage payment for quality care instead of sheer volume of services.
Uh-huh. Has he asked King Ben and Queen Olivia yet? And does he really think he can get Lie-berman to vote for anything that "limits" corporate options to deny insurance to sick people? Let alone at least one Pub-borg. Heaven knows we can't do anything nto upset the Republicans in either the actual GOP or the New Democrat GOP. That wouldn't be...serious.
What's serious is attacking the Left. Hello, Clinton BFF and Third Way Mystic Lanny Davis.
A lot of nonsense will be served up over the next days in the wake of the Massachusetts debacle, but it will difficult for anyone to top Lanny Davis, the idiot savant of the New Democrats, for the most inane commentary.
As the polls closed in Massachusetts, Davis was scurrying into The Wall Street Journal to place the blame on the left, “the strident purist base of our party.”
Let’s see. Obama packs his White House and economic team with former Clintonistas; devotes one-third of his stimulus plan to ineffective tax cuts; rescues the banks without reorganizing them; wastes months seeking bipartisan support on health care, jettisoning the public option along the way and insisting on taxing health care benefits rather than the wealthy – and the “left” is to blame?
The blithering stupidity of this argument gets worse as Davis expounds on it. He says Obama went wrong by straying from the successful New Dem formula championed by Bill Clinton: “balanced budget fiscal conservatism, cultural moderation and liberal social programs administered by lean and mean government" (by which he must mean embracing the Gingrich plan to repeal welfare, while outsourcing government to private profiteers).
Davis is an embarrassment and has been for years but it's not like he'll be the only one. He's just the first of the Republican Democrats to say it but by tomorrow - or tonight - it will be all over the Village Networks. It won't matter that it doesn't make any sense. It won't matter that it's movement conservative black-is-white/day-is-night Orwellianism. All that will matter is that they've got another excuse to kill sizable chunks of remaining Democrats, who will either have to morph into moderate GOoPers or be purged from the New Democrat party.
Surprisingly, this is not as ugly as it's going to get. Are you ready for a Third Party Movement yet?
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