This morning when I woke up, I was still angry at Reid for telling reporters before the Labor-H override vote that the Dems were ready to come back after Thanksgiving with a bundled bill and $11B in cuts for Dear Leader to consider. My beef is that he removed any pressure the party-over country dead-enders who support BushCo's War on the Poor and Middle Class may have been feeling to do the right thing. But then I realized something I knew but clearly hadn't internalized - probably because my faith in our system of government isn't completely dead. He knew the numbers; the vote was already over for him. Pretending otherwise would have simply been a courtesy to the voters. And, if I think about it, an unkind deception - why pretend that there's hope when there is none?
Of course, I don't believe that Reid's timing was motivated by any care for the electorate. Everyone on the Hill knew the numbers weren't there for an override. Why not just move on as quickly as possible and get your message out there? Of course, the message is that the Dems won't go to the mat for the people who are helped by the funding in these domestic spending bills - vets, seniors, children, the working poor and lower middle class, etc .... Instead they will roll back the spending yet again in another compromise to try to clear Dear Leader's ridiculous spending hurdles. If you want an image to wrap your head around, consider homeless veterans, hungry seniors and cold families standing on each other's shoulders. The Dems have to decide how many of them to pull off and throw into the dirt until the height of the tower is low enough for Dear Leader to drag over himself, his tax breaks for the wealthiest 2%, his War of Aggression and his failing occupation of Iraq. Oh, and his deeply held sense of Compassionate Conservatism.
And that's the way we must want it to be because if we didn't, then the dead-enders wouldn't have been able to get the votes they needed to force more cuts to an already inhumane budget. If we wanted to fund human needs, help our hungry families, our hungry seniors, our homeless vets, our vets with PTSD, our children who can't afford preschool, our familes who can't afford to heat their homes, our displaced workers who need to learn new ways to earn, our young adults who can't afford college ... if we really cared about them, then it we would have brought so much pressure to bear - simply by picking up the damn phone to call the people who represent us - that they would have truly had to choose between party and country. We didn't do that. Is it because we didn't know how to do it or that we could do it or that we needed to do it? Or is it because we really don't want to spend money helping people who are not us? The Democrats clearly believe that it's the latter because they were not willing to roll the dice on our support. It's hard to blame them.
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