It's never advisable to wade into the torrents of bad feelings in blog land on days like today. Writing diaries in response to other diaries feels like an exhausting game of tennis. And diaries such as this one risk the wrath of the diary police.
But if my fellow Kossacks find it useful to weave a cocoon around The Ed Show and Arianna Huffington while cursing the wind, I thought itemizing other ways we could waste our time might be helpful.
Follow me for a list after the jump.
Ways we can all waste our time today.
- Listen to anything Arianna Huffington says. I made this comment in another diary, but the bottom line is that she's a shameless self-promoter and a hack. Useful at times, but not when we have decisions of consequence in play. She has little if any useful insight into anything that bears on political reality. I would say that her appearance on the Ed Show last night would be her Katrina of punditry, but no decent human being would use Hurricane Katrina to make a crass political point. Right?
- Act like a former Obama supporter, while deploying the term "Obamabot." It's an offensive term used to belittle others. I guess someone could self-apply it to be ironic, but more likely the one deploying the term was never that big on Obama. Plus, the term is guaranteed to turn half of your intended audience off.
- Impute motive and intent into every legislative outcome. It's fun to think everything is under the control of the all-powerful President Rahm Emanuel. But it's a fruitless exercise in outrage and conspiracy thinking that doesn't really bear on the realities of the US Senate. If the Senate could pass a robust/weak/triggered/Medicare-substitute public option, Obama would sign it. Period. If everything we say about Joe Lieberman is true, there's nothing we could've done short of personal blackmail to get him to change his mind, and even that wouldn't work. The 60th Senator dictates the debate. It sucks, but people like Sherrod Brown, Chris Dodd, Chuck Schumer and others realize that the legislation is about saving lives. Joe Lieberman doesn't care about the people, but we should.
- (I Hate to Say This) Take Howard Dean's advice on the bill. At the risk of pissing off everyone here, I'll just assert that it's galling for a former DNC chief to recommend killing this bill and consigning his political party to almost certain oblivion. Yes, I realize he's making his case for reconciliation, but he's fooling himself and others if he thinks it's a viable option at this point. Frankly, I agree with Ezra that Dean did us a disservice by getting people to think that the HCR bill was "meaningless" without the public option. It's just not true, and it's part of the reason why we're in this dilemma. If people were really of the mind that the public option was the bottom line, then the populist base would be satisfied in killing the project without it. That mindset took months to cultivate, and for what?
- Play into Joe Lieberman's hands. This point didn't come into such stark relief until this morning when I read this post on TPM: "Playing us for chumps":
I don't pretend to know Joe Lieberman's motivation, but it's working to perfection if his goal is to divide Party leaders (Obama, Reid, etc.) from the Democratic progressive base.
Yup. Mission accomplished. I would only add that if everything we say about Lieberman is true, then he's perfectly happy to let the bill die. In other words, killing the bill not only kills the Democratic Party and the people who will be denied insurance, but it also gives Lieberman another victory. Worse, Lieberman would win not just the battle over the public option, but the war over health care. Win for him. Lose for us.
Folks, we can't let anger cloud our thinking. We can't scuttle the president's ability to succeed by blaming him for things out of his control. And we can't be satisfied to dwell in our message cocoon because it feeds our already inflamed passions. What was true last year during the campaign is true now. We need health care to pass this year.
And what Nate Silver said. Also.