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For mass consumption, the GOP is usually better at its creative Reasoning of the Day, or at the very least, it usually sticks to just one hallucinatory invention at a time. Rare, indeed, is this sort of conflicting simultaneity, which is more than enough to stop even the chronically inattentive American Voter in his or her logical tracks:
Just as House Minority Leader John Boehner was blasting the weekend airwaves with the message that he and his party are doing "everything we can to make it difficult for them, if not impossible, to pass the bill," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was convulsing in sympathetic anguish: Dear Democrats, you've got to realize, in the name of all that's holy, that passing this bill will severely harm your chances in the upcoming elections.
Asks The Voter, logically enough: Then what in hell is John Boehner doing, trying to stop it?
Ay, there's the rub, Denmarkian rottenness and all that -- which appears to be turning this health-care tragedy to a comedy; turning it, that is, from a revenge play to a rather one-sided political farce.
Being no Prince Hamlet, one hopes, President Obama is exploiting Republicans' curious cognitive dissonance: "I generally wouldn’t take advice about what’s good for Democrats" from the GOP leadership, he confessed to an amused Pennsylvania audience this week in an uncharacteristic moment of vigorous non-bipartisanship. His core message, however, in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, is that the imminent health-care vote should be about what’s right, and not about the politics.
Oh, how I wish that were true. Taken literally, of course, it is. Every Congressional vote should be about what's right, and not who goes home on a bus. But "should" is a foreign concept in Washington whenever the politics of self-preservation are in play, which means whenever politicians are breathing.
Before leaving office Obama may, in fact, clear to some small degree Washington's atmosphere of rancidity, but he -- as well as anyone else -- will never clear the smoke-filled cloakrooms of political self-interest.
Which isn't an entirely bad thing, assuming one embraces the strictest canons of representative democracy. I recall a political science professor of mine -- an old-school gentleman I always suspected as a crypto-parliamentarian; none of this retardant separation-of-powers business for him --who'd become almost palsied while railing against the American electorate's immense disdain of politicians playing ... politics. What else in the sweet name of James Madison, he would furiously puzzle, do they think politicians should do?
All of which leads me to this rather charming observation about your average American liberal, as temperamentally separated from your average American conservative: The former, it now appears, as opposed to the rabidly ideological latter, is extraordinarily realistic. And in that, there can never be sufficient praise.
This point of American liberalism's overarching realism was driven home this week in a MoveOn poll, which tallied member opinions about the immediate future. "Should MoveOn support or oppose the final health care bill if it looks like the plan recently proposed by President Obama?" Yea, verily, 83 percent said Go with it!, even though, I'm sure, the very same 83 percent most recently and most vehemently demanded a public option.
Was the inclusion of a public option the right way to go? Of course it was. But it was also politically prohibitive, notwithstanding the astonishingly misleading countermessage now coming from some progressive organs. Demagoguery, it seems, is hardly the exclusive sales territory of the right.
But by and large, liberals aren't buying it. Immersed in an idealistic pragmatic realism, the larger liberal collective understands that American progress is a principled but long, tough, piecemeal slog -- not a pep rally that produces instant and happy results.
And I, for one, am proud of them. Only a trench-warfare mentality, determined to take a yard here and a yard there -- just as FDR's groundbreaking New Dealism did -- will prevail, since the politics of always doing only "what's right" is a surefire loser.
Just as House Minority Leader John Boehner was blasting the weekend airwaves with the message that he and his party are doing "everything we can to make it difficult for them, if not impossible, to pass the bill," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was convulsing in sympathetic anguish: Dear Democrats, you've got to realize, in the name of all that's holy, that passing this bill will severely harm your chances in the upcoming elections.
Asks The Voter, logically enough: Then what in hell is John Boehner doing, trying to stop it?
Ay, there's the rub, Denmarkian rottenness and all that -- which appears to be turning this health-care tragedy to a comedy; turning it, that is, from a revenge play to a rather one-sided political farce.
It might be funny if it were not DEADLY serious.
Oh, how I wish that were true. Taken literally, of course, it is. Every Congressional vote should be about what's right, and not who goes home on a bus. But "should" is a foreign concept in Washington whenever the politics of self-preservation are in play, which means whenever politicians are breathing.
Before leaving office Obama may, in fact, clear to some small degree Washington's atmosphere of rancidity, but he -- as well as anyone else -- will never clear the smoke-filled cloakrooms of political self-interest.
No. The only things that will clean up Washington, D.C. are publicly funded elections and for the new Congress to do something about the latest power grab for corporations by the Supremes.
All of which leads me to this rather charming observation about your average American liberal, as temperamentally separated from your average American conservative: The former, it now appears, as opposed to the rabidly ideological latter, is extraordinarily realistic. And in that, there can never be sufficient praise.
This point of American liberalism's overarching realism was driven home this week in a MoveOn poll, which tallied member opinions about the immediate future. "Should MoveOn support or oppose the final health care bill if it looks like the plan recently proposed by President Obama?" Yea, verily, 83 percent said Go with it!, even though, I'm sure, the very same 83 percent most recently and most vehemently demanded a public option.
Was the inclusion of a public option the right way to go? Of course it was. But it was also politically prohibitive, notwithstanding the astonishingly misleading countermessage now coming from some progressive organs. Demagoguery, it seems, is hardly the exclusive sales territory of the right.
But by and large, liberals aren't buying it. Immersed in an idealistic pragmatic realism, the larger liberal collective understands that American progress is a principled but long, tough, piecemeal slog -- not a pep rally that produces instant and happy results.
And I, for one, am proud of them. Only a trench-warfare mentality, determined to take a yard here and a yard there -- just as FDR's groundbreaking New Dealism did -- will prevail, since the politics of always doing only "what's right" is a surefire loser.
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