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| By: hctomorrow Tuesday December 22, 2009 9:54 pm | |
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34 Comments
How dare you talk about my misses behind her back. Heh.
It isn’t only conservatives and republicans who live in this post-fact world.
Indeed not. I’m used to the crystal-healing, homeopathic-peddling, autism-must-be-caused-by-thimerosol-no-really reality deniers on the Left, but this particular brand of denial seems ascendant among a lot of people who previously you could rely on to be grounded in reality, at least most of the time.
Yet here we are, asking people to pay 20% of their income and still face the risk of medical bankruptcy. Screwing over every major Democratic constituency at once to pass a bill that benefits only the shareholders of large insurance companies.
It’s like a contagious insanity.
When people invest their hopes and dreams into a project, especially a political candidate, they have a very difficult time realizing that the bloom is off of the rose and that they are being screwed. Once they realize that, then there are all sorts of emotional processes that play out, stages of denial and all.
What we’re seeing now is the assumption that Bush II was anything but the obvious dot connecting Clinton and Obama, that the hullabaloo about how bad Bush II was had simply been constructed to corral Democrats into unity so that one team of corporate pimps could beat another.
Yes, Bush II was bad, but he was nothing special compared to the Democrats who bracketed him, economically, politically or militarily.
But what we’re seeing here now is a surge in not just denial, but of those who are in denial constructing elaborate edifices with which to convince themselves that “this is not happening, this is not happening,” all while putting forth the brave face based on the premise of:
1. the tea baggers oppose Obama
2. progressives oppose the Senate bill
3. therefore, progressives are tea baggers, all hail Obama
The response to Jane’s attempt at an anti-Senate health bill coalition with the right were particularly illuminating. People form coalitions all the time, even in our non-parliamentary government. In fact, normally there’s a severe bipartisanship fetish in our media and Congress, where a bill or idea, no matter how flaky, is considered better if you have members of both parties, even if it’s just one of one party, officially in support; likewise, a bill of idea is worse if it’s only supported by one side, and factual analysis never need come into the matter.
Yet when Jane proposes forming an alliance of convenience on one topic against one specific bill, pointing out a situation where we share specific concerns, grounded in fact, with a right wing group or groups, she got pilloried. The bipartisan fetish no longer applies.
Funny how that works.
“People are desperate not to lose that wonderful feeling of progress they got last November. So desperate they’ll refuse to see the truth when it stares them right in the face, so long as it has a pleasant, technocratic spin and the person pushing the plan doesn’t sputter and stammer along like a dry-drunk.”
Well said.
Thank you.
I myself never caught the Obama speech-fever. He’s too sing-songy for me. But much like almost everyone else I was struck with a profound sense of relief at first that we had a President who could follow even a short train of thought and use complete sentences like a grown up.
Still, you have to adjust, and look beneath that pleasing facade at the actual policy, and a year later, many of us still aren’t doing that.
Cult of personality. We see the markers, yes. It won’t hold. The illusion is dissolving. And the personal cost of the legislation to date (Wall Street, no lending on Main Street, failed foreclosure assistance, credit card protection scam, and now indenture to health insurance peddlars) will bust the cult, even if it takes until 2012.
Democracy in the US is a set of rituals predicated upon enabling the elites trumping popular will. Media frames the debate in terms that if people’s needs are met, then that is a violent act against democracy.
Just like the right wingers are scared about uncertainty and they demonstrate that in their own way, liberals are scared that they’ve invested all of this political capital into a scamster. Some can cut in run in real time, others will hold on until the bitter end, unable to come to terms with precisely how wrong they were, railing against the “stupid tea baggers” all the way down, as if they were not hoodwinked and therefore equally stupid.
I just posted a youtube video of an ad by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee of Obama’s “campaign” promises [sic] in which he spoke out clearly IN FAVOR OF the public option, and COMPLETELY AGAINST the personal mandate.
Perhaps that will be simple enough for some low-information voters to understand.
recommended, now off to Twitter and Facebook
Feel free to link to it here. I’d love to see videos of him pushing the PO. I’m sure The Daily Show will make some too. At least, I hope they will; normally they love mocking flip-flopping.
I would only critique the author’s assertion that firedoglake is a “tiny oasis of sanity.” As he also points out, once people become aware of how this Bill will affect them personally, Dems will take a huge hit. I don’t like saying it, but who else is to blame? As a university professor, I’ll make it part of my business to inform my students (about 120 per semester) exactly what this Bill does contain, and does not contain, and ask them to go to Facebook or MySpace and voice their own opinion to their friends, and so on. I think we’re about to see a mass contagion of sanity, and it doesn’t look good for proponents of this wretched Bill in its current form.
I don’t want to see Dems fail. I don’t want to see Republicans gain seats in the House and Senate. But when Independent voters who may have voted Democrat in the last election have to choose between their own financial futures and Democratic Party unity, if Republicans promise to repeal this Bill, how do you think people are going to vote? I oppose this Bill because I support what Dems are supposed to stand for. Kill this Bill NOW!
Well, true, tiny is a relative thing. Definitely a minority point of view on the left at the moment though. As for mass outbreaks of sanity, man it would be nice.
Though a lot of Obama supporters might discount reality, since I’d wager a heaping helping of it will come from Fox News (hey, first time for everything). Lots of sob stories with actual sobbing from people losing their healthcare, people who hate the Exchange, people who can’t see a doctor.
And man, can you imagine the blood curdling screams when the first people compelled off good health insurance and onto the Exchange get denied some lifesaving treatment or surgery? Or their kids?
Rupert Murdoch will be a very happy man if the Senate version passes.
Brillian article. I’ve been saying the same thing on a private BBS for Writer’s Guild members for months, but man, have a lot of them drunk the Kool-Aid. Obama is the greatest fraud in American political history, the scammer of scammers.
The only silver lining I see is that maybe this will prompt the forming of an effective, 50-state third party. We can only hope.
Sometimes you have to force people to make choices they don’t want to make. But then, you can see where people stand and you know what you’ve got to work with.
Very good diary.
So many people have drunk the kool-aid. It’s both terrifying and infuriating to see how they react when challenged too.
I just got done commenting on a thread on another site which helped to prompt this diary (its name rhymes with Spittoon Moose). A guy chose to make fun of Jane for her hair, and the post degenerates into crude sexual jokes and bad puns about her last name. Why? Because she’s trying to get Rahm to resign.
I mean, what kind of degenerates make fun of someone for having their hair affected by chemo?
It’s absolutely incredible. I nearly had a stroke when I read it.
“I did not have sexual relations with that Public Option”
;))Thanks….some things will live on & on..
That kind of humor is very effective.
Mail it to the daily show and let’m use it
Mail
I’m pretty sure they’re off until the first of the year.
A few days ago online, I heard my same thoughts repeated…that the Senate Bill was crap, worse than nothing, a gift to Insurance Corporations…etc.
Now on another site, it is like someone turned on a switch and so many are attacking anyone that speaks against the plan, Obama or Rahm.
I feel like I am in bizarro world. I hope it is mainly the centrists and a few folks that actually work for OFA who are trying to have their day in the sun.
In my real life, I have yet to meet anyone that will support any part of this bill. So it just seems weird that online…with what are supposed to be progressives…people seem to be trying to convince themselves and me that really is a good bill.
Nuts.
Great diary, highly recommended. My three biggest concerns with the election of Barack Obama when I felt it clear he was going to be Clinton 2.0 prior to securing the Democratic nomination were as follows:
1) Being that he wasn’t a progressive reformer, the tipping point created by the end of the Bush Presidency was going to be utterly squandered on rehashing neoliberalism.
2) That because people had convinced themselves that he was a progressive reformer, especially the faux-outraged right, the utter impending failure of his neoliberalism would be painted as a failure of progressivism.
3) The much maligned 30-percenters, the people who supported Bush no-matter-what, that so many reveled in criticizing on the right would find themselves in good company with a whole new set of 30-percenters favoring Obama on the left. Creating a condition where a full 60-percent of the voting public is completely incapable of having an issues and principles based democracy; with the remaining 40-percent divided almost down the middle across ideological lines.
The electorate clamors for celebrity from their leadership.
I spend most of my life hoping above all else that my extreme skepticism be proven drastically unwarranted. Unfortunately, I’m just not that lucky.
< let’s recap the Senate bill.
The Senate bill is an unaffordable mismash, with inadequate subsidies that place a crippling level of expense on its intended victims. It has an individual mandate with high penalties but a weak employer mandate, so weak that 17 million people will see their coverage dropped so that their employers can dump them into the exchange.
Once on the exchange these unfortunate souls, along with 30 million other fresh, compulsory-customers, will face junk insurance policies with 70% actuarial value, most likely with confusing terms, high copayments and deductibles.
If they fail to pay their health-tax, they will be subject to a fine instead, in which case they receive absolutely nothing. >
Excellent. Very well written.
Now, please allow me to connect the dots. The above have the RAHM EMANUEL stamp of (the) abysmal all over them.
Emanuel is also a die-hard supporter of the Cheney-Bush wars. You will look long and hard for ANY comments by the de facto co-president over the past 8 years where he was vocally, energetically critical of ANYTHING then Vice President Cheney said or did. Not even when Cheney attempted to sell US ports to… Dubai Ports World, and did succeed in “outsourcing” Halliburton – the entire multi-billion dollar US DEFENSE CONTRACTING company – to Dubai…!!
The dirty secret in America is that it is the NEO-CONS…. NOT the Wing-Nut White Supremacist “fundamentalist” WASP Christians – who are THE MOST POWERFUL supporters of Dick Cheney.
The proof of this is simplicity itself: Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Gingrich, Phil Gramm, Dick Armey, are all out of power; Boehner and McConnell can’t are downright clownish (and their obstruction could be blown away in a heartbeat, IF ONLY the White House tried); Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman can’t even speak in coherent paragraphs, and if the above isn’t enough… Sarah Palin was selected to be John McCain’s running mate, by… uber PNAC Neo-Con BILL KRISTOL!
(And, finally, if the above isn’t enough to demonstrate that the AIPAC/PNAC/neo-con war lobby are Cheney’s STRONGEST, MOST INFLUENTIAL, most powerful supporters, there is always “let’s go to the video” –
here attendees at the 2007 annual AIPAC conference, in Washington DC, stands and loudly, lustily cheers then VP Cheney’s most bombastic “bomb Iran now!” speech, proudly defying the midterm elections which, in ousting the Republican House and Senate majorities, forestalled those very attacks on a THIRD major country that Cheney, AND AIPAC, were so lusting for.
http://www.aipac.org/2785_2859.asp
http://www.aipac.org/pc2007video/Speeches/Cheney/index.html
Forget comparing Rahm Emanuel to Joe Lieberman…
Rahm Emanuel is directly comparable with PAUL WOLFOWITZ, no less than “the architect of the Iraq war” and occupation, like Emanuel (shoehorned into Wasserstein-Perella investment bank in 1998 by then powerful Clinton Treasury Secretary, and former GoldmanSachs chairman, Robert Rubin), Wolfowitz was placed in charge of World Bank (by President Bush in 2005)…. despite not having any financial experience on his resume.
There you have it. The “Democratic” Party has been effectively hijacked by those, of whom Emanuel is only the most visibile, who effectively have NO divergence from the Cheney-Wolfowitz agenda.
We effectively have ONE-PARTY RULE, with DEMOCRATS about to BEAR THE BLAME, for Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bush, and Bernanke’s awful policies and decisions of the past 9 years.
“I hate to say it, but those Conservatives were right, if premature: this is a rapidly becoming a cult of personality”
As to their own leader, remember, they were in denial 1st.
round and round we go…
And how would it be with John Rambo McCain huh? They’d be lining up the laced TEA cups, waiting to give birth to the dominionist-idiocrat-fief and her very own “cult of personality”.
That being said, this is a well composed entry, thanks for putting it together, and sharing it with us all.
oops, it’s late and I’m a little distorted:
“dominionist-idiocrat-liege…” (in-wait)
8-)
56 minutes until the 1st card is pulled!
There most certainly is a cult of personality element. Go over to Orange and feel the hate. It’s not a matter of logic. As others above have pointed out, a simple logical test: do the recent arguments about how awful it is actually to conduct politics with strategic alliances apply themselves with consistency to Obama himself and his own conservative allies? No, of course not. Jane Hamsher is Faust for a strategic initiative with Norquist. WHAT THEN IS OBAMA WHEN HIS ENTIRE F-ING PRESIDENCY IS TURNING INTO BUSH III?
If you actually are progressive and you actually focus on issues, rather than on the person of coolguy Obama, you see how deep is the betrayal. War. Torture. Climate change. Wall Street. Education. Let’s take those five: beyond a pretty speech or two, pls. tell me how we are doing anything on those issues beyond continuing Bush? On HCR, it might even be worse than Bush. This disastrous bill will give ‘govt health care’ a bad name for a generation. It keeps the radically corrupt system in place, to suck us even drier, just as the Obama-Dem machine did its best to suck us dry of Hope. I will NOT get fooled again by these f**kers.
Very well said. It’s absolutely a cult of personality. I’ve been accused of being a “teabagger” and worse on the big orange website that used to be my online home because I want to hold Obama accountable for the centerpiece of his campaign. I imagine you’ll see some more migrants over the next few months.
I’m tired of being taken for granted by the Democratic Party. I’m tired of being baited and switched. I’m both glad and sad to know I’m not the only one. The Democrats are the best hope for progressives, but we can’t seem to get them to make good on their promises to us. They should have learned after 2000 and 2004 they can’t win without us, and it seems they did in 2008, but I’m afraid they’re going to have to learn they can’t count on us if they only give us lip service.
We should form a “DK to FDL” support group. :) Like you’re saying, I imagine those ranks are growing and will only get bigger.
Thanks for the compliment on the diary.
As for the choices you’re attempting to force people to make, I’m still amazed at how controversial people pretend this process is. Parliamentary coalition building just isn’t new, even in our odd form of democracy. I’ve heard endless chatter about how important it is to ‘reach across the aisle’, but that’s only when said reaching agrees with the centrist position, I guess.
The Drew Westen article/post up on HuffPo makes the point that the Obama administration consistently avoids any area of conflict by playing to the center. I wonder how much of this is conflict avoidance vs. crass politican expediency.
If you can keep the embarassing questions from being asked, then you don’t have to provide the embarassing answers.
I did not buy the oratorical orgy of Orwellian robotic hero worship that Obama produced. The Obambots in the cult of worship troubled me and still do.
I voted for Obama but was basically concerned with 2 things:
His lack of experience and his need to lean heavily on others.
Beware his sellout to BigPharma and using rhetoric like “Reform” to legitimize his sellouts and the WHouse propoganda machine that hypes this story. The story of forcing uninsured to buy private insurance or suffer fines of $750.00 or 2% of their salaries. The word is mandate.
This mandate is entirely different than single payer, or a plan with a robust Public Alternative [Option]. Private Insurance has bought America.
But the cult aspect of many supporters suggests that they need to believe, and will never give up dreaming.
However the important bloc of liberals and independents who think for themselves and don’t need these props will be critical and fight for what they were promised. Or at least move Obama to more transparent and fair policies.
Honestly though, I believe he wil lose out and cost the Democrats big time.
It turns out Obama is conceited and defensive. His stubborn detachment and unwillingness to engage is infuriating, and his speeches sound hollow,dry, and robotic. He won’t commit.
While the wee Obamabots in the Village cling to their hero, we the people will use our voices as we should. Cults are dangerous.
It is politically opportunistic and expedient. But very short sighted.
You are not the only one. I know of many that oppose Obama’s style and policies.
As individuals start to face the actual realities that are contained in the HC bill, sooner or later they will hate it. There is a huge bloc of the population that has been sarificed to the Insurance and Drug cartels.
The Honeymoon is over, and the window of opportunity is closing.
The start has not been good with Wall Street bailouts without transparency,
credit card rates esclating with no regulatory laws in place stop them except for Obama’s speeches. Afghanistan and Copenhagen among the rest are not gaffes. Afghanistan is a premeditated political strategie that could only exist because a lack of a draft. Copenhagen was a failure but Obama has been crowing about it’s success. The economy is a disaster and mortgage relief has been seriously incompetent and slow.
I’m wondering how he’s going to get to a second term with this kind of disengagement and poor judgement.
Nathan, a great post.
Reality shows, celebrity cultism, and robotic behavior have produced this debacle. Our culture is corrupt and shallow.
Voting for celebrity and tolerating its results is poison for our democracy.