Dennis the Peasant has some lucid thoughts:
Much to my delight, I spent most of this week alternately entertaining and chauffeuring an old college pal who was visiting the wilds of Central Ohio. As opposed to sitting in front of a computer speculating about whether Obamacare would pass. I said last week that I thought it would pass, and it will. Anyone who was paying attention to Bart Stupack’s imitation of Hamlet should have known by last Thursday that he was never going to vote ‘no’.
So Obama and Pelosi will have their bill, and Democrats own health care for better or for worse.
Sure, it’s shitty legislation, but I can’t say I’m all that worried. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in 25.5 years of dealing with people and their money, it’s that they will do anything to ensure their standard of living is not lowered. And that’s why I think that much of Obamacare will never actually see the light of day. In the end the mandate will go away, rather quietly, and by mutual consent. Probably via an indefinite delay in implementation. People simply will not tolerate a government order to lower their standard of living; and demanding a family making $88,000 pre-tax to spend $15,000+ after-tax to fulfil Obamacare’s mandate is just that.
And while Obamacare does in many ways threaten our way of life, our liberty and so on and so forth, I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that it really has had its upside as well. It’s been pure, unadulterated joy to watch legions of sanctimonious, holier-than-thou progressives sell out for the sake of pure partisanship and/or personal gain. It’s been fun to watch the kept men like Markos Moulitsas, Matthew Yglesias, Josh Marshall and countless others ditch single payer and the public option as if they had never once considered either worthy of interest, much less their support.
We’re to the point where progressives are now out-Clintoning Bill Clinton. They’re now worse than the DNC Bill Clinton forced upon them. The DNC they loathed. The DNC they’ve so often derided as being so centrist as to be sell-outs. Now they’ve got health care reform written by AHIP and financed by PhARMA, and they couldn’t be happier. They’re now in the same league with boob-jumping evangelists, Hummer-driving treehuggers and spendthrift Republicans… and they couldn’t be happier.
Like I said, that almost makes it all worthwhile.
The central drive of leftism is the primitive atavistic need to dominate and control other human beings. Both as individuals and a group, modern leftists have the exact same psychology/sociology as pre-industrial aristocrats. They have an unerring faith in their own moral and intellectual superiority and the consequently granted right to rule over all others.
They don’t actually care about policies or ideas. Neither do they particularly care about the people directly affected by those policies. They simply care about dominance. Any action that lets them express this dominance is hailed as a great victory on their part.
I always come back to the leftists mythology about the Vietnam war. In the leftists mythology, the “peace” movement was a resounding success because it “stopped the war.” Of course, it did no such thing. All it did was remove one actor from the war, America while leaving the entire region to suffer for another 20 years brutal warfare combined with the greatest proportional democide known to history. Peace only came with the end of communism.
Why do leftists regard the abandonment of the people of Indochina to megacidal totalitarian communism as a great moral victory on their part? Easy, because their true goal was to dominate the American right. They never cared about the people of Indochina or Americans in the military, they merely used those helpless people as pawns to dominate the right with. Once the people of Indochina had served their purpose, leftists threw them to the wolves. Once the slanders against US soldiers served their purpose, they dropped them as well and suddenly lost interest in punishing the men and officers who, as John Kerry testified under oath, “behaved in the manner of Ghengis Kahn.”
Dominating the right is the only good for leftists. Policies are just the ends to that domination. It doesn’t matter what the policies are or what outcome they produce as long as the ones supported by leftists win. All the far-left activists abandon their supposedly long standing deeply held beliefs because they never really cared about them. When totally different policies give them the same sense of domination they drop their old beliefs and adopt the new ones.
I think Shakespeare has more to teach us about politics than all the supposed writings of political “scientist.”
The Left has an option that is not available to groups which follow a rational analysis. They can drop their policies when politically expedient because those policies would not / do not work anyway.
Leftist utopias are great to visit, but it is difficult to live there.
The beauty of a promise is that you “get the girl” now, even if things don’t manage to work out long term.
The Best Promises Win
“Per me si va ne la citta dolente,
per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
per me si va tra la perduta gente.
Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;
fecemi la divina podestate,
la somma sapienza e ‘l primo amore.
Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.”
“Through me the way to the city of woe,
through me the way to everlasting pain,
through me the way among the lost.
Justice moved my maker on high.
Divine power made me,
wisdom supreme, and primal love.
Before me nothing was but things eternal,
and eternal I endure.
Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”
http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/pdp/
Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri,
Book Inferno, Canto III: 1-9
I’ve pointed this out in the past here, but the Left is much more skilled when it comes to politics than the Right. The GOP could never have passed something with so much opposition from the population.
The Left is especially talented relating to use of the media. Some of you may have heard the story about the African American Congressman who was called “the N-word” (ie.., the worst word in the world) while the bill was being debated in the House. The media (even FOX) have been making a big deal about this all day.
It was obvious from the time I heard about this that it was a staged event that featured a Leftwing operative standing in the crowd and screaming “the N-word” (the worst word in the world) as the Congressman happened to walk by. The Congressman himself probably wasn’t in on it, as this was probably the work of one of his staff members?
Either way, it was genius becuase it plays on the propaganda surrounding the Tea Party folks as being “racists” (the worst thing you can be in the world) but even better, happened while much of the nation was watching the news.