David Brooks:
Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.
Reality:
South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint:
"If we’re able to stop Obama on this [health care insurance reform plan] it will be his Waterloo. It will break him," he said.
The inhumanity is the present health care system, not the lack of capitulation by liberals. Brooks has nothing to offer but sanctimonious pleas for civility, since discussing the facts of our health care system would make his pleas sound both ignorant and servile.
4 comments:
Brooks is really a disgrace to humanity. The idea that comity between parties is necessary, rather than sympathy for the actual victims of failed policy, is just horrendous. Its what has bugged me the most about disingenous Republican arguments about the "process" of making legislation. There are violations of the rules--like keeping the voting open to twist arms, or legislators accepting bribes from industry on the legislative floor--but the rest of the time the point of legislation, its highest duty, is to get something done for the people. If its aimed at doing that lets discuss the bill on its fucking merits. Brooks knows he can't, and he has the servile servant's (as opposed to the unionized or hostile kind) overidentification with the master and his needs. Cry me a fucking river if the Republicans refuse to sit with the Democrats at lunch.
aimai
At least by posting his tripe in the Times Brooks gets it roasted by the readers, most of whome say basically the same things as Susan.
Not that anybody at the Times (except Krugman) ever reads their comments.
Opposing Political parties ought to clash, argue and mistrust one another. When supposedly different political parties get along, agree in the essentials as Ours do, despite the charade; it is bad news for the People.
It took the Repugs & Dems working amiably together to allow the S&L looting, the Enron fraud & theft, and to repeal Glass-Stegal and other banking/investment regulations, which lead to the current quasi-depression.
That would not have happened if the Dems & repugs had *really* been antagonistic as is essential in a working Democracy.
Even now, the Dems aren't providing *real* health care reform, are they? Just a few stale crumbs to the worst off: to the sickest and poorest Americans which the insurance companies don't want anyway.
Any hint of helping the people currently paying horrendous premiums for uncertain service, and then the insurance companies haul out their idiot Pundits and their shambling half-baked Zombie protesters- and inexplicably *those* schmucks have the power to affect the entire Democratic party's behavior; unlike the 77% of Americans who want health care reform.
Yes, that's the funny part. Real health care reform wasn't even on the table. We're all fighting to make health insurance required, and can only hope we'll get something in return.
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