The tea party has shouted abuse at a disabled man and attacked the veracity of 11-year old children. There is no low to which the teabagging does not sink. I blame Michelle Malkin for this behavior — “Going Galt,” indeed.
I have to make changes to this video, but you should watch it anyway:
They aren’t nice people. They’re a mob, and when regl’ar folks become a mob they are like any mob known to behavioral science. That is to say they have a mob mentality. When organized with attention to inclusion and general welfare, a protest is a beautiful thing; when it is organized by bringing together John Birchers, Ayn Randists, various Catholic sects, neocons, corporate citizens, libertarians, and netizens, you eventually get a schism. The new right is an uneasy alliance and perhaps even an explosive combination.
The political science term for this is fissiparous.
Between high narrative and low effort, you can break this beast. Call it…oh…I don’t know…11-Dimensional Chess.
Think about it. Health care was Obama’s Waterloo; the GOP would repeat history by counting on a president to make all the wrong moves. But Obama defied this narrative, choosing patient persistence over confrontation. When there finally was confrontation, he made his case.
In fact, his entire approach has been the 180-degree opposite of all the teabagging projection. Making a symbolic major concession (single-payer) simply means he has a perfect record of not meeting his opponents’ expectations.
The health care bill works thusly:
(1) You have a duty to cover your health care, i.e., a mandate, i.e. “personal responsibility.” In Canada, they call it “taxes.”
(2) You have a right to buy a policy that actually covers you. No pre-existing conditions, no lifetime limits.
(3) If you are too poor to afford a policy, one will be afforded you through Medicaid. There will be no more means-testing for Medicaid in the south, ending what can only be compared to the practice of literacy tests for voting during Jim Crow.
(4) If you have income but no insurance, the government will make it cheaper for you and someone WILL have to sell you a policy.
(5) You will have a choice of policies (i.e., “free market forces” will be unleashed).
(6) The IRS will collect a tax on everyone without a health care policy. That will make sure the idiots are covered in the ER. My own local hospital is going bankrupt over the issue of unreimbursed indigent care costs.
(7) Plans that cost too much will be taxed. Which is okay, because what insurance companies offer in premium plans is really just improved customer service and easier access to boner shots. the cost of a plan doesn’t determine the quality of care — doctors and nurses do that.
(8) Insurance companies will have their net profit limited. Whatever is left over must be spent on care. The IRS will be checking forms to catch libertardians dodging the mandate, but they’re actually going to spend most of their time checking the books at Big Insurance.
(9) The plan is popular and will only get more popular with time. Families getting $10,000 a year for insurance are not going to complain.
(10) The law will reduce the deficit by more than a trillion dollars in 20 years while extending the life of Medicare by at least a decade.
(11) It will bend the overall cost-curve down so we don’t all go broke.
I’m still not sure what the negative is. The same doctors and nurses will be providing care without working for Uncle Sam. Where is the grand socialist takeover is insurance profits, and it is hard to defend companies that hike rates 40% in the middle of a recession.
The public option seems alive again, the agenda moves forward, and Democrats march on. Obama signals a future public option effort now because promises made by a president to AHIP, AMA, PhRMA, or the hospital industry are not binding on Congress. Basic Civics here, folks!
Who is getting the knife in the back? Where is the sellout? I see neither. I’d say this is a victory, and what’s more I’d say the president has improvised, adapted and overcome the tide of town hall zombies to create real and lasting reform we can build on.
Prominent HuffPo firebaggers, however, tell me this is a sellout to the insurance companies — something they share in common with Michele Bachmann. She was using FDL talking points while gazing hypnotically into the camera Friday night:
We find the furthest point from the political center in the place teabaggers and firebaggers meet. If Obama pushes for a train of jobs bills, confirmations, and perhaps even a climate-related bill to follow the breach made by passing health care reform, then we might be looking at the most powerful force of change since FDR. It didn’t happen fast enough or violently enough to satisfy everyone, but it has happened.
I hope David and Jane do not put themselves on the wrong side of this. If she starts staring at the camera like Bachmann, her Sanders-Kucinich triangulation will have become a trigonometry I do not understand.
This was always possible, and the opposition made it inevitable. It is their own fault. Up next: watch the split as tea party and Republican Party divide at primary time. Authoritarians take themselves far too seriously and I have no doubt we’ll see an attempted third party movement (which will fail).
Against the facts and the steady, relentless march of progressive action around the country, the Attack of the Town Hall Zombies has been defeated.
“11-Dimensional Chess” began as a denunciation of Obama’s strategy by those who wanted more and faster. It was never about a chessboard, however, but simple rational empiricism. Logically, the correct response to this event is not to indulge in PUMA fantasies about President Hillary and instead push harder than ever for a public option.
Call. If you’ve already called, renew your call. Let’s do this thing. We aren’t the pawns; we’re all pieces in the first dimension of this game, and I’m not appointing knights. I do my part; now let’s do our democratic duty and finish the reform we set out to do.
The Billionaires will take us out with a new hymn:
Yes. Let there be progressives raising their voices. The right ain’t got nothin‘ on us. And the more we do a good job of getting out the puppets and paint the more we can put the right to shame by singing in one united voice; and who knows? Maybe our point will be made to those in the halls of power.
Sunday sermon over.
