Month: October 2009

PCCC Strikes Again

by digby

The House minority leader, John Boehner says:

“I’m still trying to find the first American to talk to who’s in favor of the public option.”

He doesn’t get out much, does he?

The PCCC is making it easier for him to connect with other people who support the public option by creating an easy e-vite to Congressman Boehner to meet with you too. Just click here to let him know how much you’d love to introduce yourself and tell him all about how much you want a Public Option.

By the way, it can’t be stressed enough what great work the PCCC has been doing throughout this health care fight. They have been relentlessly hammering both corporate Democrats and Republicans in their home states on this issue with a series of great ads featuring their own constituents as well as a number of other excellent campaigns. There has been a lot of great activist work during these past few months but Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor and their crew have been tirelessly working away at their strategy, hitting it again and again with a very smart tactical approach that I believe has been extremely helpful to keeping this issue on the front burner. There is no doubt in my mind that but for these efforts, along with all the others of course, the public option would have been off the table long ago and we would now be arguing over whether there should be any subsidies at all and whether insurance companies should even be forced to pay bills for sick people in the first place.

So bravo to the PCCC and Bold Progressives. Any money you give to them is money well spent.

.

Same, Same

by digby

I just want to reiterate what Greenwald wrote yesterday about the official determination by the EU that Georgia was the instigator of the war with Ossetia and make note that the same people (with the exception of George Will) who went reflexively General Ripper on us, are going to be screaming at the top of their lungs to “stay the course” in Afghanistan. They should not be trusted. They are clearly full of shit. (This isn’t exactly reassuring either.)

But you do have to give McCain credit. When he said “We are all Georgians now” he was quite correct. America has a long history of creating pretexts to invade other countries and blaming it on the victims. Why, we just did it six years ago. Peas in a pod.

.

Up Or Down

by digby

Good for Stern:

One of the nation’s most powerful union leaders warned conservative Democratic senators on Thursday that there would be a “price to pay” if they voted to sustain a Republican filibuster on health care legislation.

Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, said he could “honor all the Nelsons” in the Senate “whether Ben [of Nebraska] or Bill [of Florida]” if they chose to ultimately oppose a reform bill on philosophical grounds. “What I don’t find acceptable,” Stern told the Huffington Post, “is that we are going to use procedure to stop discussion.”

There are 60 senators caucusing as Democrats, and that should mean something, Stern said. “If the Democrats have told people like ourselves, supporters for a long time, ‘Just give us 60 votes. Give us the money, give us 60 votes and we will show you what we can do.’ Well, it’s show time,” said Stern. It takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

“The Democrats could close the door in the Senate and take a vote right there,” he said. “The question really for them, which is much bigger than health care, is are they going to shoot themselves in the foot on bill after bill by allowing individual senators to all the sudden become king or queen for the day?”

The administration needs to have a few words with the Senate as well and pull out all the stops.

.

The Homicide And The Cover-Up

by dday

I’m sure the Fox-bots will be talking about some other grave misconduct inside the Obama Administration today (“the candy czar took a Snickers bar away from a baby!”), but a truly sickening story of political cover-up is unfolding in Texas, should they care to turn their heads.

A top prosecutor in the Tarrant County district attorney’s office said Wednesday that he has no idea why Gov. Rick Perry abruptly removed him from the Texas Forensic Science Commission.

Perry abruptly replaced three members of the commission — including the chairman — just two days before it was to meet to discuss a finding that a faulty investigation might have led to the execution of an innocent man.

The meeting was subsequently cancelled.

Perry also removed board member Aliece Watts, a forensic scientist in Euless.

The governor told The Associated Press that the board members’ terms were expiring and that replacing them “was pretty standard business as usual.”

But several board members have had their appointments renewed, The AP reported.

The chairman was replaced by a DA named John Bradley, “one of the most conservative, hard-line prosecutors in Texas,” who never heard of the position until Perry offered it to him on Wednesday.

Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death in 2004 for an arson that killed his three daughters, but the overwhelming body of evidence, detailed in this New Yorker article, is that he was an innocent man. The article notes that Dr. Gerald Hurst, an arson expert, ran an investigation of the incident and concluded there was no evidence pointing to Willingham and that the fire resulted by accident, and delivered a report saying the same to Gov. Perry’s office before the execution, which the Governor then ignored (there’s no evidence he even looked at it). The board meeting to review the case could have determined that Perry’s negligence led to the state killing someone innocent of any crime.

Perry didn’t want that information revealed, and so he shut down the board. And given that he faces a March primary for another term as Governor, he probably really wanted to make sure that the board wouldn’t meet again until after then.

Simon Malloy writes:

This is all, at the very least, quite fishy. It’s also potentially earth-shaking — never before has it been conclusively determined that someone in this country was wrongfully put to death. If Cameron Todd Willingham’s innocence can be proven, it would upend the entire rationale behind our system of capital punishment. And yet there hasn’t been a whole lot of media coverage – a Nexis search of all news sources for the past two days for (cameron w/2 willingham and perry) turned up seven results.

What are we being treated to instead? In-depth and sensationalist reports about what President Obama’s “safe schools czar” said to one of his students 21 years ago. That’s the problem with letting Glenn Beck set the news agenda – the stories that actually matter sometimes slip through.

We’re talking about state-sanctioned murder here, or at least negligent homicide, with one of the most obvious cover-ups to that action.

I know I’m not conservative enough to be America’s assignment editor, but this seems worth a mention.

Update: by digby

This is really shocking. I wrote about this case a month ago. Jesus.

.

Doomed To Repeat It

by digby

Ok, my head just exploded. I apologize for the mess.

Chris Matthews is interviewing Taylor Branch about his new book about Bill Clinton. He lived through the 90s. He was reporting from Washington throughout them. He had a show during much of them. And he seems to not know anything about what happened during that time.

He is, naturally, obsessed with the dirty, dirty, but beyond that his knowledge of events is just bizarrely wrong. For instance, he asks Branch why Clinton “never dealt with” the Lewinswky scandal, (apparently thinking he needed to apologize for the 793,125th time.) He asked him if he ever confessed to “cracking up” and screwing up his presidency. Here’s what followed:

Branch: Well, first of all, he was frustrated that his presidency was off course and besieged by tabloid scandals for six years of which the Lewinsky one was the only one that proved any substance. He forfeited the attempt to rise above the cynicism of the tabloid era by validating that cynicism with Monica Lewinsky. And his only explanation was that he felt sorry for himself, yet he was trying so hard to to be a good president and all anybody wanted to talk about was filegate, travelgate and whether or not he had killed Vince Foster.

Matthews: Did he think that people … well let’s get to some of the more extreme charges against him. Did he think that anybody thought that, anybody real, I mean we talk about the nut jobs all the time. But does anybody really think that Bill Clinton put a hit on his friend Vince Foster?

Branch: No, but it stayed in the news for six years.

Matthews: What news?

Branch: …. that’s astonishing. It was all over the place.

Matthews: What newspapers carried that?

Branch: Well first of all..

Matthews: The Clinton Chronicles, you know and Fox

Branch: Ken Starr could make stories about it all the time. It was an official investigation of the Whitewater special counsel.

Matthews: I forgot, you’re right. What’s his name, the guy from the mid west who shoots the canteloups. He got involved with it.

Branch: So the only purpose of that was to lead toward impeachment which, of course, is where it wound up. That’s what you have a special counsel for.

This isn’t the first time Matthews has completely mangled recent history in ways that make you wonder if he’s even sentient. But this one is really stunning.

The Vince Foster investigation was not only investigated by Ken Starr. It was investigated by the police and the FBI and it was ruled a suicide. That wasn’t good enough for the Republicans in both the House and Senate who conducted their own investigations. Coming up empty,they nonetheless insisted that the Whitewater Special Counsel Robert Fiske also conduct an investigation, which he did, and also determined that it was a suicide. At that point, the three judge panel made up of Republican operatives that assigned Independent Counsels, fired Fiske and appointed Ken Starr who took up the investigation again.

You can make the case that there would have been no Lewinsky scandal if it hadn’t been for the Foster investigation since Robert Fiske seemed to be at least somewhat sane and he probably wouldn’t have thought it within his purview to make a federal case out of an extramarital affair.

That Matthews doesn’t remember any of this and seems to think it was confined to the margins of Limbaugh and Falwell is just mind-boggling. But I think that’s how the entire Village sees that. They refuse to admit that it was the mainstream media that pimped the scandals that made the whole Village swoon with excitement for eight long years:

Matthews: Why did he hate the press?

Branch: Because he looked up to the press and he thought they should be trying to do the agenda of the country but instead they were falling in behind the Republicans who were chasing all these tabloid stories.

Matthews: But you know… most people watching this show say that … I’m not talking about our show because I have a tough sort of attitude … but they would say that the mainstream broadcast nets, ABC, NBC, CBS are all sort of somewhat left of center, certainly conservatives say. They’re not lefty, they’re establishment liberal.

Why would he think that the liberal establishment, reflected in newspeople’s opinions were anti-Clinton? [head explodes here — ed]

Branch: (looking at this point like he’s walked into an insane asylum) That’s what drove him nuts. But more specifically, the New York Times and the Washington Post drove the Whitewater scandals and he always looked up to them and he though they were sucked into some tabloid netherworld that was detracting from his agenda for the country.

Taylor Branch is so clearly not a villager it’s almost like he’s talking to aliens from another planet in this press junket. They simply cannot believe what he has to say. And yet, it is exactly as I remember it: the truth being before my eyes while the likes of Chris Matthews refuse to acknowledge it — don’t even see it apparently, so dizzy are they still with the potent musk of Monica madness.

There is simply no doubt that Taylor Branch is correct — the media turned into a bunch of gossipy scandalmongers eager for any right wing piece of dirt they could smear on Clinton and the Democrats, all the while protesting that they had nothing to do with it. Matthews doesn’t even know the most basic facts and he was reporting it at the time. (And he is paid five fucking million dollars a year!)

I’m sorry, but this is so disturbing. It isn’t just Matthews. It’s the whole village, which constructed this alternate universe that is, as Branch went on to say, still with us today. They turned politics into a scandal machine and rewrote the story to their own liking as it was happening. It was the most frustrating thing I ever lived through. it led to the excoriation of Gore, and the eight years of George W. Bush and the legacy of failure and debt he left behind. I blame them as much as anything for this.

And as you can see with all these jackasses drooling and slavering over this Branch history, in which the only thing they still care about is Monica, Monica, Monica (and whether or not Hillary really is a frigid bitch) they haven’t changed a bit. (Acorn! Hookers! Homos!)

If you are a religious person, be sure to say a prayer for Taylor Branch. He’s about to have his sterling reputation destroyed and not only by the wingnuts who will eviscerate him. The smirky smugness of Chris Matthews makes it clear that the Villagers are not going to stand by and let this man tell the truth.

Update: While I appreciate the fact that Matthews defended Grayson today (and defended him well) the problem remains that he and the villagers don’t have an ethical compass on these things and that’s a problem for our politics in general.

.

What’s In A Name?

by dday

Harry Reid is now saying there will be a “public option” in any final health care bill. I’m sure nobody knows precisely what he means by that.

U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said today there will be a “public option” in whatever health insurance reform bill comes out of Congress.

“We are going to have a public option before this bill goes to the president’s desk,” Reid said in a conference call with constituents, referring to some kind of government plan.

“I believe the public option is so vitally important to create a level playing field and prevent the insurance companies from taking advantage of us,” he said.

Tom Harkin said almost exactly the same thing today – and he said that Republicans wouldn’t be at the table when the two Senate bills get merged together.

Here’s the good news about this. Reid is acknowledging that he absolutely cannot get away with having a final bill without something he can call a “public option.” And progressives have done a good job of very specifically separating out triggers and co-ops as something that would not fit that definition. This is almost entirely due to grassroots activism. The public option would have been thrown out months ago if nobody was advocating for it from the bottom up. It was certainly not the intention of anyone in Washington to go into October with this issue still up for grabs. They were perfectly content to jettison it to protect insurance industry profits.

That said – there is no definition here for what public option means. And if you asked Sen. Reid point-blank, I’m sure he wouldn’t give you a definition. He wants something that he can call a public option so the grassroots can be satisfied. What will that be? Probably not co-ops or triggers because they’ve been too well-defined by the grassroots. There are other alternatives coming in their place.

Tom Carper is pushing the idea of giving the states the ability to create a public option, which states could then link together for increased bargaining power. They wouldn’t be able to use Medicare bargaining rates and they wouldn’t have Medicare’s provider network. And being state-based, they wouldn’t have much leverage to gather the client base necessary to force a lot of competition with the private market. Of course, a lot of the “public options” out there offer weak, “level playing field” provisions similar to Carper’s amendment. Jon Cohn says that actually, this is already in the bill:

One interesting question is whether the proposal is already redundant, thanks to an amendment that another member of the Finance committee, Ron Wyden, introduced that Chairman Max Baucus accepted before the hearings even began.

It’s Wyden amendment C8, which appears on page two of the modified bill Baucus introduced formally for markup:

Amend Title I, Subtitle A to allow a State to be granted a waiver if the state applies to the Secretary to provide health care coverage that is at least as comprehensive as required under the Chairman’s Mark. States may seek a waiver through a process similar to Medicaid and CHIP. If the State submits a waiver to the Secretary, the Secretary must respond no later than 180 days and if the Secretary refuses to grant a waiver, the Secretary must notify the State and Congress about why the waiver was not granted. – Insert at the end of b)(1) ―and with citizen input through a referenda or similar means;‖ – In b)(2) strike ―a‖ and insert ―this‖ – Insert b)(4) ―the State submits a ten-year budget for the plan that is budget neutral to the Federal government.‖ – Insert at the beginning of c)(2) GRANTING OF WAIVER.— The Secretary shall approve the plan only if it meets criteria consistent with that of the America’s Healthy Future Act, including that it shall lower health care spending growth, improve the delivery system performance, provide affordable choices for all its citizens, expand protections against excessive out-of-pocket spending, provides coverage to the same number of uninsured and not increase the Federal deficit.

What does the gobbledygook mean? Wyden’s staff says it’s designed to encourage state experimentation. I haven’t yet gotten an official reading from Finance Committee staff on their interpretation.

But my own reading, which I’ve run by a few analysts, is that it gives states the ability to implement coverage schemes that bolster coverage, control costs, and improve quality at least as well–and hopefully better than–the Senate Finance bill. That would include creating a public option. (You could even read it to allow a state-based single-payer plan.) So it’s the Carper amendment, but without the restrictions.

Cohn notes that the HHS Secretary would have to rule, in the Wyden Amendment, on whether any state proposal met the proper criteria. Which means that, under a Republican Administration, you could see nothing helping people allowed to go through, or even scale-backs to benefits (though there is presumably a federal floor).

Still, maybe this is what Reid will determine as a “public option.” Or maybe he’ll dump Wyden’s amendment and pick up the Carper idea and call that a public option. Or maybe Maria Cantwell’s proposal, which allows states to negotiate on behalf of the uninsured below 200% of poverty level for a basic plan, will fit the bill, even though it sounds like a good policy but in no way a substitute for the public option.

The point is that all the activism and advocacy has gotten us far further than we would normally be in this debate. But there are still plenty of compromises out there that politicians will call “the public option” as an escape valve. It will be important to see these policies for what they are, instead of applying the name and being done with it.

UPDATE: Sen. Cantwell’s amendment passed the Finance Committee. It’s a pretty good policy, especially for the working poor, but it’s not quite a public option. Glad to see it in the most conservative iteration of the bill, though.

.

Cook’s Special

by digby

Charlie Cook may be the most influential villager there is after Dean Broder. And here’s his latest edict:

The Cook Political Report says that Rep. Alan Grayson’s (D-FL) latest comments “reinforce our view that he will be highly vulnerable when the spotlight is on him, regardless of whom Republicans nominate.”

Cook moves his rating on the FL-8 seat from “leans Democrat” to “toss up.”

Keep in mind that Charlie Cook has some very specific ideas about how Democrats should govern:

MATTHEWS: What was his biggest mistake since inaugural, Charlie, from the numbers you look at? Is it going with that grab bag of stimulus stuff on the Hill?

COOK: I think that was it, but I think also on health care.

I think something like this has to be bipartisan. Big, big public policy changes have to be bipartisan.

MATTHEWS: I agree.

COOK: He should have brought in Republicans.

MATTHEWS: Can he save this by cutting a deal with the Senate Republicans? Can he save his bacon?

COOK: I think, when he did not—was not willing to go along with malpractice reform, he effectively ended any chance of getting any significant—any—any measurable Republican support.

Right. If only he’d gone for tort reform, the Republicans would have been on board.

Evidently, Cook actually believes the teabgagger Republicans would genuinely and sincerely love to work with President Obama and are more than willing to meet him halfway it’s just that the dirty hippies are causing trouble. And Alan Grayson is one big troublemaker.

None of this would matter much — Cook is just another villager, after all — except that the party committees who decide who gets money flutter around him like he’s the cutest Jonas Brother. And he’s now saying that Grayson’s “acting out” is going to cost him — even though the Republicans can’t even find anyone to run against him!

So, I wouldn’t expect that the Party is going to forgive him for telling the truth and standing up for himself. Charlie Cook finds that unseemly and we can’t have that.

Oh, and by the way, while Orrin Hatch is saying that the bill absolutely shouldn’t pass without at least 70(!) votes, Mitch McConnell is saying there is pretty much nothing the Democrats could do to get Republican votes. So it’s clear that Cook and the rest of the wealthy, well-insured elites who insist that there has to be a huge bipartisan majority to pass health care reform are really arguing for the status quo — you know, the one that says “don’t get sick and if you do, die quickly” — the health care system most of America lives under. No biggie for them —sucks for the rest of us.

Update: By the way, Michelle Bachman said last night on the House floor that the Democratic health care plan creates “sex clinics:”

The conservative congresswoman suggested that if health care reform passes, the nation’s schools might begin offering abortions to students. Bachman’s interpretation of the health care reform bill holds that the legislation is designed to bring Planned Parenthood into educational facilities. According to Bachmann,

The bill goes on to say what’s going to go on — comprehensive primary health services, physicals, treatment of minor acute medical conditions, referrals to follow-up for specialty care — is that abortion? Does that mean that someone’s 13 year-old daughter could walk into a sex clinic, have a pregnancy test done, be taken away to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, have their abortion, be back and go home on the school bus that night? Mom and dad are never the wiser.

Adam Green was on Schuster and rightly called her “crazy.” Shuster’s co-host (sorry, didn’t catch her name) said she thought that Green’s comment was over the top. Seriously.

It’s getting really claustrophobic down here this in this rabbit hole.

.

Other Voices, Other Rooms

by dday

I guess there was a big confab of the War Council yesterday about what to do in Afghanistan, and clearly the team has split over a counter-insurgency or a counter-terrorism strategy. Now, in many ways that’s two sides of the same coin, just a matter of how to explain the killing of foreigners. And I don’t know if either strategy gets us closer to an exit – we’re not going to kill every terrorist, as surely as we’re not going to convert every Afghani into a tribune of democracy. But I do think it’s clear that shifting away from a COIN strategy at least offers the possibility of getting us out of the region in a shorter period of time, and hopefully with less blood on our hands. So I’m rooting for the Biden faction. It appears that Bob Gates is the key swing vote here.

That said, the next War Council meeting could maybe have a representative of the people from the country whose destiny is being decided by men in suits half a world away.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan – Take advice from locals instead of trying to impose your own ideas on a tribal society. Invite the Taliban to the negotiating table. Use traditional governing structures rather than reinventing the wheel. And spend a lot more money on plowshares than on swords […]

Afghans interviewed in their shops and on the streets have plenty of advice for the U.S. president and his allies: Don’t necessarily leave, but for your sake and for ours, you’d better get a lot smarter about what you do here.

Several said they welcomed the presence of U.S. and NATO troops, whom they view as far more benign than the Soviets who occupied the country in the 1980s. They fear that a rapid withdrawal of foreign forces could throw the country into another civil war.

But they don’t necessarily think a foreign military buildup is the answer.

“I’m afraid the Taliban will only get stronger,” said Obiadullah Zahir, 30, a dress merchant, standing beside a row of attired mannequins with broken noses and missing arms. “I’m afraid America will leave and war return.” […]

Either you try to get the Taliban to buy in, said Amin Khatir, 24, a student in the capital, or you face an enemy that is increasingly entrenched, organized and more broadly distributed. That’s a big problem, no matter how many pieces of fancy equipment foreign armies may wield.

“The Americans only want to deal with those they meet with, who speak English, not the ones farther away,” Khatir said. “An election can’t solve more than 1% of our problems. We must find a new way, and the main issue is security.” […]

Rather than sanction some minimally acceptable election, he said, Afghanistan should convene a traditional loya jirga, or meeting of power brokers from around the country, as it did after the Taliban was ousted.

“If you pile more bricks onto an unstable house, the whole thing will collapse,” he said.

Are any of these sentiments making it into the War Council?

Mr. President, you’re being very deliberative about this process. Be sure to get some local perspectives, too. It’s your bombs, but it’s their county, after all.

.

On Fits And Starts

by digby

The Politico has written a somewhat unenlightening article about Alan Grayson’s floor speech, but I can’t help but be a little bit tickled by a quote of his, which is also used in the headline of the piece. He said:

“We cannot run this institution on the basis of Republican hissy fits.

The title is “The pros and cons of hissy fits.”

I’m please by this because I think I may be the one who coined that particular phrase, or at the very least popularized it. In any case, I have characterized these phony Republican outrage fests that way for many years on this blog and wrote a piece explaining it called “the Art of the Hissy Fit” for Campaign for America’s Future blog, (reprinted here by Alternet)

The Art of the Hissy Fit

By Digby , TomPaine.com
Posted on October 25, 2007, Printed on October 1, 2009

I first noticed the right’s successful use of phony sanctimony and faux outrage back in the 90’s when well-known conservative players like Gingrich and Livingston pretended to be offended at the president’s extramarital affair and were repeatedly and tiresomely “upset” about fund-raising practices they all practiced themselves. The idea of these powerful and corrupt adulterers being personally upset by White House coffees and naughty sexual behavior was laughable.

But they did it, oh how they did it, and it often succeeded in changing the dialogue and titillating the media into a frenzy of breathless tabloid coverage.

In fact, they became so good at the tactic that they now rely on it as their first choice to control the political dialogue when it becomes uncomfortable and put the Democrats on the defensive whenever they are winning the day. Perhaps the best example during the Bush years would be the completely cynical and over-the-top reaction to Senator Paul Wellstone’s memorial rally in 2002 in the last couple of weeks leading up to the election.

With the exception of the bizarre Jesse Ventura, those in attendance, including the Republicans, were non-plussed by the nature of the event at the time. It was not, as the chatterers insisted, a funeral, but rather more like an Irish wake for Wellstone supporters — a celebration of Wellstone’s life, which included, naturally, politics. (He died campaigning, after all.) But Vin Weber, one of the Republican party’s most sophisticated operatives, immediately saw the opportunity for a faux outrage fest that was more successful than even he could have ever dreamed.

By the time they were through, the Democrats were prostrating themselves at the feet of anyone who would listen, begging for forgiveness for something they didn’t do, just to stop the shrieking. The Republicans could barely keep the smirks off their faces as they sternly lectured the Democrats on how to properly honor the dead — the same Republicans who had relentlessly tortured poor Vince Foster’s family for years.

It’s an excellent technique and one they continue to employ with great success, most recently with the entirely fake Move-On and Pete Stark “controversies.” (The Democrats try their own versions but rarely achieve the kind of full blown hissy fit the Republicans can conjure with a mere blast fax to Drudge and their talk radio minions.)

But it’s about more than simple political distraction or savvy public relations. It’s actually a very well developed form of social control called Ritual Defamation (or Ritual Humiliation) as this well trafficked internet article defines it:

Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. For the purposes of this essay, the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and “insensitivity” or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.

The article goes on to lay out several defining characteristics of ritual defamation such as “the method of attack in a ritual defamation is to assail the character of the victim, and never to offer more than a perfunctory challenge to the particular attitudes, opinions or beliefs expressed or implied. Character assassination is its primary tool.” Perhaps its most intriguing insight is this:

The power of ritual defamation lies entirely in its capacity to intimidate and terrorize. It embraces some elements of primitive superstitious belief, as in a “curse” or “hex.” It plays into the subconscious fear most people have of being abandoned or rejected by the tribe or by society and being cut off from social and psychological support systems.

In a political context this translates to a fear by liberal politicians that they will be rejected by the American people — and a subconscious dulling of passion and inspiration in the mistaken belief that they can spare themselves further humiliation if only they control their rhetoric. The social order these fearsome conservative rituals pretend to “protect,” however, are not those of the nation at large, but rather the conservative political establishment which is perhaps best exemplified by this famous article about how Washington perceived the Lewinsky scandal. The “scandal” is moved into the national conversation through the political media which has its own uses for such entertaining spectacles and expends a great deal of energy promoting these shaming exercises for commercial purposes.

The political cost to progressives and liberals for their inability to properly deal with this tactic is greater than they realize. Just as Newt Gingrich was not truly offended by Bill Clinton’s behavior (which mirrored his own) neither were conservative congressmen and Rush Limbaugh truly upset by the Move On ad — and everyone knew it, which was the point. It is a potent demonstration of pure power to force others to insincerely condemn or apologize for something, particularly when the person who is forcing it is also insincerely outraged. For a political party that suffers from a reputation for weakness, it is extremely damaging to be so publicly cowed over and over again. It separates them from their most ardent supporters and makes them appear guilty and unprincipled to the public at large.

Ritual defamation and humiliation are designed to make the group feel contempt for the victim and over time it’s extremely hard to resist feeling it when the victims fail to stand up for themselves.

There is the possibility that the Republicans will overplay this particular gambit. Their exposure over the past few years for incompetence, immorality and corruption, both personal and institutional, makes them extremely imperfect messengers for sanctimony, faux or otherwise. But they are still effectively wielding the flag, (or at least the Democratic congress is allowing them to) and until liberals and progressives find a way to thwart this successful tactic, it will continue. At this point the conservatives have little else.

What do you suppose today’s enforcers of proper decorum would say to this?

Americans too often teach their children to despise those who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place – the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. — Mark Twain

At the time I wrote it, I had little hope that we would ever be able to end this silly practice because the Democrats both capitulated to the GOP’s smug sanctimonious caterwauling and refused to turn the practice back on them. But I think Grayson may have shown the way. It takes guts and it takes being willing to have Gloria “Cokie” Borger tut-tut you like you are an errant child, but if you are willing to go right at them and then refuse to back down, the Republican propensity to call for the smelling salts whenever the Democrats do the same things the Republicans do might just die out. It’s the first sign I’ve seen that it might happen.

I couldn’t be prouder that Alan Grayson used the term, which I think is appropriately disdainful of the practice. If he is showing Democrats how to beat back these destructive faux outrage fests, he will have done a service that is as significant as anything else they’ve done:

Nancy Pelosi is shrugging off GOP calls for a mea culpa from Alan “they want you to die quickly’ Grayson.

“We have to have a debate that is not distracted from… Apparently Republicans are holding Democrats to a higher level than they are holding their own members,” she said, referring to floor comments by some Republicans who have said Democratic health care reforms would lead to higher deaths among seniors.

“There’s no more reason for Mr. Grayson to apologize… If anybody’s going to apologize everybody should apologize,” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference.

If you haven’t thanked him yet, you can click the thermometer above and send him a little token of your gratitude. As you can see, those tokens are adding up.

Update: To be clear, I didn’t mean to suggest that I invested the actual phrase “hissy fit.” Obviously, I didn’t. I know many of you think I am mentally deficient bordering on catatonically dumb, but really, I’m not quite that vacant.

My point was that I thought I had coined the phrase for the particular form of faux outrage and phony indignation that’s been routinely practiced by the Republican Party of the past few years, in which they pretend to be upset by blowjobs, insults to military commanders etc., all things theyroutinely practice themselves. It’s also called political hypocrisy, but has a very specific character and forms in a very specific way.

When I use the phrase “Republican Hissy Fit” I’m referring to a particular political tactic that was not invented by them, to be sure, but was perfected during the past couple of decades. I don’t think I’d ever heard that phrase used before in that context, but if there are references to “republican hissy fits” to describe this tactic that pre-dates the blogosphere I’m happy to apologize for taking credit for populoarizing it.

.

.

Peaceful Coexistence

by digby

I see that the insurance executives are quite happy with health care reform, which is unsurprising since they will get a whole bunch of new customers. But it turns out they are even sanguine about surviving if they have to compete with a public plan:

“I believe the private system is important because it brings innovation, it brings energy, it brings change, it brings ideas that are often used in the public sector system as well,” said Richard Collins, senior vice president for underwriting, pricing and health care economics at UnitedHealthcare. “I think we can have both a public and private system.”

The Democrats should start quoting this expert.

Via David Sirota

.