within the hour Krugman has posted on his NY Times Blog, called The Concience of a Liberal, a piece he labels Orwellian Centrism. It is a direct reaction to reading the Washington Post piece of blather by Dana Milbank. He focuses on Milbank's blaming the debate on the public option for the delays in health care, and subsequent loss of the House. As Krugman writes:
The debate over the public option wasn’t what slowed the legislation. What did it was the many months Obama waited while Max Baucus tried to get bipartisan support, only to see the Republicans keep moving the goalposts; only when the White House finally concluded that Republican "moderates" weren’t negotiating in good faith did the thing finally get moving.
And then he lays on the beating:
So look at how the Village constructs its mythology. The real story, of pretend moderates stalling action by pretending to be persuadable, has been rewritten as a story of how those DF hippies got in the way, until the centrists saved the day.
Yep. We know this. Its all the fault of us DFHs (I at least am old enough to qualify on age, although at 64, Meteor Blades and I are among the more senior of the visible members of this site. Folks like kos were not even alive during the period of hippies. Oh, and I was political active, not a hippie drop out, dirty or otherwise).
But Krugman is not done. He not only targets the Village people.
He ends like this:
The worst of it is that I suspect Obama’s memory has gone down the same hole.
Now my thoughts, a few of them.
Obama waited on health care for Dems to work out a deal with Republicans. The Republicans stalled and moved the goal posts. Finally he stepped in. They screamed. The Senate used reconciliation. Now there are lawsuits.
And on taxes he expected something different?
Leaders lead. Good leaders learn from previous attempts. They do not forget and pretend it never happened.
To say you know the Republicans are intransigent, gee, why would you wait until after the election for ANYTHING important, knowing that even if you kept both the House and the Senate you would almost certainly lose seats in both, and thus have a weaker position?
jI am tempted to offer quotes from this administration and pair them with those from 1984, perhaps in the later case always being at war with East Asia, to illustrate the Orwellian nature of arguing for centrism.
But Krugman does not need my help with words.
Short, to the point, powerful.
Think the Villagers will ever learn?
I doubt it.