The Dems are that dead rat in the wall, and all we can do is wait for the smell to go away
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[KUCINICH] "Every criticism I made, I maintain. The bill is flawed, it's not the bill I want and I've been pretty vocal about it. So I had to ask myself am I going to just rest on my philosophical position, which I remain committed to and look at the American people and say, 'You know, I'm not going to do this.' There is a moment of decision you have to make."
Hamsher was right; I was wrong. Kucinich was kabuki.*
Unfortunately, that makes everything kabuki, including Hamsher's efforts to run the public option bait and switch. So there we are!
NOTE * I'm assuming that if Kucinich had gotten something for caving, it would be mentioned somewhere. Nada.
NOTE I need to hat tip a commenter for the "dead rat in the walls" metaphor. But I forget who!
UPDATE Of course, there's an alternative theory, that being that Hamsher's initial post on what Kucinich might ask for was bait; and Hamsher's current shift to populism is pre-positioning for Andy Stern's switch to from union boss to (third) party leader. I mean, who knows? These people are all as twisty as corkscrews. And see also jawbone here.
UPDATE Hat tip to alert reader Anne for the "dead rat in the wall" metaphor.
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Comments
the sad thing is that
in the remote possibility that this thing is still defeated it won't be because it is horrible legislation, but because it isn't horrible enough.
it tells you how bad it is that they don't even want a recorded vote on it.
Oh, look, the excise tax is back!
Okay, it never went away but one of the only reasons they were able to round up House votes was to make it kick in at higher levels. Funny thing is that now that all of those "progressive" House members have signed on - they may increase the size of the excise tax because the Senate's rules won't permit reconciliation as it currently stands - the House fix is too expensive. Anyone want to bet the House goes along with it anyway - even though this was a deal breaker just a little while ago?
I remember when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up there was a lot of discussion about momentum and how these things take on a life of their own - at a certain point in the countdown, nobody wants to be the one to stop it. It looks like the WH - who fucking loves the excise tax - got the countdown momentum going and is not going to try to revive the excise tax it's always wanted.
If labor goes along with this, it's leaders are truly worthless.
I have been thinking the same thing
almost all the unions endorsed Medicare for All at their national conference and their leaders just ignored them. We need some shop floor leaders to come forward and challenge them.
Invasion of Body Snatches-when McCarthy's girlfriend zombies out
... such as when Kucinich went crony.
Obama claims to be building the foundation of healthcare ... why is he building it in the wrong place, as one of my brothers pointed out last night, pre-Kucinich sucker punch. Kucinich himself on C-Span insisted the Obama administration was building health care reform ON SAND.
Why couldn't he get something, Kucinich? Nada, you say lambert. Geeeesssssshhh. Why does he walk away from Obama emasculated as the highest profile voice of the Left in Congress? Wow. The one person whom the media had to acknowledge who represented millions of us single payer anti-Obamacare citizens? One more enabler to notch onto your belt, Barack. One more scalp.
Cronyism is the cause of the problems in Congress. Kucinich succumbed to cronyism? So what if you lose your next election? It is important enough to stand by morality.
The Democrats now in lock-step against the vast majority of their supposed constituents. They have learned the lessons of amoral Republicanism ... and are CLONES.
Get me Ralph Nader, please! Cindy Sheehan! Thank you Jonathan Tasini!
Thanks for the angry metaphor, lambert!
That was me, lambert, in the earlier
Kucinich post; I went on kind of a dark rant, and that's where I ended up...dead mouse in the wall, stinking up the place, and you either rip up the walls to get it out, or you wait for the decomp to be complete.
Thanks, Anne
Do feel free to propagate this metaphor....
Who wrote the dead skunk under the floorboards metaphor?
That one's been intriguing me: Would it smell worse than other dead critters in that the skunk's scent glands might emit the highly recognizable odor as the body decomposed?
Or, in dying would it do one last defensive squirt/blast?
Or...you get the picture.
Was the skunk image used here? I can't recall where, just that it sure stuck in my mind, my imagination, and even in my nasal passages.
I think the "skunk" came from your imagination...
I wrote, riffing off Anne's metaphor, about a dead animal under the house.
But on reflection, in that case, you can go under the house and drag out the decomposing body.
However, if the dead rat is behind the walls, you have to live with the smell or tear down the house. So her metaphor is better.
dead skunk
from kick baucus to the curb, later in that same thread
There's a phrase they use on DU: "IBTL"
"In before the lock," as in "I'm commenting in the nanosecond before the mods shut down this thread."
I was just wondering how long it would take for a thread with this title to be shut down there....
Let's have a contest!
Seems like a excellent metric, similar to MTBF.
BTW, I have the #2-rated post on DU right now
http://www.democraticunderground.com/dis...
A variation on a post I did here.
I have to say...
I think Jane was genuinely burned here, not just by the pols but by all these activists and access bloggers that pretended they wouldn't support a bill without the PO only to not only do that but bully and threaten the last liberal standing to do the same.
Sounds like they all burned each other
One of the horrible things about watching the blogosphere over the last two or three years is that the mores of Versailles are trickling downward and becoming popularized.
Jane said today
"It gets old being right after a while..." Well, no. But I don't necessarily begrudge her the effort she's made. More than other progs have done.
Yeah, I know...
I mean, obviously I think her advocacy plan was flawed(see my sig.), but man, those other groups in on the plan with her, were not even serious. That has to smart.
perhaps
genuinely burned
or FDL functions as the dumping ground for bill-dislikers/dead-enders.
I mean, I find it difficult to believe she's on the outs w/ other sites given that they run ads served up by her company.
I just think she really thought the "progressives"
were going to see the PO strategy through, and was essentially abandoned, which doesn't surprise me since from what I can see they have no principles outside of winning. But, maybe she's allowing herself to be used that way. Seems odd but maybe.
i think
places like dkos are getting cleansed of all heretics, so FDL is the landing spot. "the crazies." It looks manufactured to me.
When reform passes, the progblogs have already been given their orders to put on a happy face. Not happy? There's a place for U.
it's hard to have a lot of sympathy for
Jane, when all this is just the same bullying, truthy behavior she allowed to flourish on her site during the campaigns, engaged in herself against single-payer advocates a few month ago AND she's dead wrong on policy. She may have thought her alliances were uber-politically savvy, that this could never happen to her, but she had no reason to.
primaries?
FDL was one of the few high traffic blogs where pro Hilliary posts got front paged. It was one of the few places where both camps could meet in the comment section.
I agree with DCB on this one
I didn't frequent it much because I just found the site too hard to use (sure, I'm shallow). And while VL has the goods on FDL in the primaries via Boehlert's book, there's no question FDL was better than many, many other sites, especially The Obama 527 Formerly Known As Daily Kos.
I agree with Valhalla...
I had the same experience she did.
I think the difference was, I was not only pro-Hillary, but anti-Obama. (I was actually for Edwards or Gore in 2007/early 2008.) It was the anti-Obama stance that FDL would not tolerate.
In some places you were allowed to be
Pro-Hillary, so long as you always added the caveat, "Of course I'll support Obama if he wins".
But to be pro-Hillary, and outright refuse to support Obama, was verboten.
It's less about Kucinich than it is about the Democratic party
I had hoped Kucinich might be one guy to hold out. After all, when he was the boy mayor of Cleveland back in the 70s, he actually refused the demands of the most powerful interests in Ohio to sell the municipal electric company and was hounded from office for his trouble.
He's only a little over 60 now, with a Congressional pension after five terms and a pretty wife a foot taller than him. and he's been out in the cold a while and back again. If anybody was in shape to stand up it was Dennis. But I guess the institution is that strong.
The minority and majority leaders, whichever, in your two-party-system party hold immense power as the repositories of corporate campaign cash. You buck them, and they fund your opponent in the primary. Add in the wrath of a Democratic president and Kucinich was looking at a Cynthia McKinney style campaign of defamation in which the press and the Obama fan base would relentlessly slander his shoes, his haircut and whatever he had for breakfast. So he folded. They will probably come after him in the primaries any goddam way. You join the friggin' mafia, you can't just leave the way you wanna.
It shows we need not just to walk away from, but to break up the Democratic party, the party of marginally less evil, and build something else out of some of the pieces.
Or we could try TAKING it at the local level.
City by city, county by county, we could take over the Democratic Party and trickle control upwards.
I like this strategy...
it goes well with the Full Court Press.
However, my concern its that if we have a dictator at the top, like Obama, who controls the DNC, then no matter how lefty the people we nominate and elect are, they'll be forced to toe the dictator's line once they get to Congress.
This is why I'm feeling stumped right now. Seems to me the local takeover model might only work if you have an authoritarian takeover. Just look at how much more liberal the Repub party was before the authoritarian "conservatives" took it over.
If you haven't read John Dean's book, "Conservatives Without Conscience," I highly recommend it for more details on this subject.
According to Ian Welsh
Here.
Guess this is what happens when you let your presidential candidate take over a lot of your party apparatus AND your outside groups.
That whole three-branches-of-government thing
is so last century. Same with answering to the voters, instead of the other way around.
I don't see how they could make that threat
the filing deadline in Ohio and many other states has passed. They could not have done anything this year. Furthermore, I don't think this bill will be popular. In fact, you could get reelected by saying you voted against it.
Nobody learned from the Massachusetts senate race.
re Jane/fdl--easier to see flea on someone than elephant on self
I am glad FDL is fighting Obamacare.
How sad she didn't unite with single payers way back when. We were all fighting against corporate oppression.
Once again, we are divided up and conquered.
I can't get over why so many are still hooked on Obama "hopium". Wow.
And once again, the most recently caved progressives will not forgive the righteously un-caving ones because the strong single payers are illuminating the selling out and that is hard for them to forgive themselves for so they project and punish the messengers. That is why this scenario is so cruel.
We've come to the point where it's easier for a dictator
to retire alive, than it is for a Senator or Congressman to leave office with his soul intact.
Think about it. These men and women have pensions, but if those public servants did anything worth a damn for us, they'd have corporate enemies who would spare no expense in barring them from meaningful work -- and even if these retired folk had got their own lives set, those of their kids, friends and supporters could be wrecked. If they don't play the game, there is no honorable retirement, if they use money as the metric of success. And they, and we, have had it beaten into us that Money rules.
That's why Congress can get away with doing nothing for decades except keep the volleyball of power going -- the real game's in the private sector, and that's the one they're playing to win.
Which leads me to wonder, as in ALL THE KING'S MEN, what was in Rahm's black book that Obama could use in that ride on Air Force One? Kucinich could have stood down with his principles intact, instead of actively flogging this bill over the finish line. What scared him so much that he's publically disavowing every principle about health care that he told us he had? We're talking about a Maslow-hierarchy safety-level threat, if he's sacrificing esteem and belonging to progressive community to put over a bill he knows is wrong.