First Senate Hurdle Passed

Reid got his first sixty. It's better that it happened than if it hadn't, but I'd be fibbing if I said I was feeling particularly celebratory. Those who declare the thing in the bag seem to me to be counting their chickens before they're hatched (of course, Oscar Wilde pointed out that that's actually the most sensible time to count them, since they move around so much after hatching...), those who expect this to get much better in committee seem to me to be a bit crazy, those who are selling this as epochal, transformational change in and of itself for either good or ill seem to me to be hyperbolic in the extreme. I've found BooMan to be a voice of sanity through much of this process so far, but his current celebration seems weirdly disproportionate to me. And even if I've disagreed with Jane Hamsher for some of the later uglier sadder stages of this sausage-making process I still think it's rude and disloyal and terribly unjust to vilify and demean her as some are doing right now. Jane Hamsher is awesome even when I disagree with her, so there. It is nice that the Republicans seem so upset, since hateful assholes deserve to feel that way for all the shit they do. I daresay if we had lost this one Dems would have imploded into full on kneejerk spastastic demoralized circled firing squad mode (even in "victory" we seem to be in for a little bit of that, but this way I don't think it is likely to be long-lived enough to impact mid-terms), but as is it looks like the Holidays will provide the marginally more edifying spectacle of continued neo-confederate muscular money-grubbing white-racist gun-nut queer-bashing baby Jesus Republican self-marginalization instead.