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Monday, October 26, 2009

BooMan Is Making Sense

Over the last few weeks I have found BooMan's analysis of the insurance/health care reform process the most relevant by far, and that definitely includes today's installment Making Tea From Tea Leaves. I strongly recommend that folks read it.

He has no truck with unsourced doomsaying missives declaring Obama secretly enraged about the progress of the Public Option he has always supported in no uncertain terms, that pronounce him a crazed bipartisanship fetishist, that prove he secretly adores triggers despite public pronouncements to the contrary, that worry he disdains democrats while secretly seeking to crown Olympia Snowe Empress of all the Russias and so on.

Given all that, it may come as little surprise that while I recommend people read BooMan I also strongly recommend that people stop reading for a while HuffPo's weird divisive demoralizing unsourced gossip-bombs and Firedoglake's recent crazy cantilevered popsickle stick bridge conspiracy theories, unless you want to lose all hope or lose your mind or both.

By the way, even though I think Jane Hamsher has gone completely off the deep end lately the fact remains and must always be remembered that her intransigence earlier in the process getting commitments in writing to the public option from the Progressive Caucus was instrumental in keeping that body disciplined for once and getting us where we are now. We are all in her debt. Although the netroots have long understood how the Villagers Inside the Beltway are hopelessly blinkered through courting "Inside" sources and chatting up would-be power brokers in the cocktale weenie circuit, and so on, it is also important to grasp how being in the trenches, fighting majorities and Rahm Emanuel types who relentlessly ridicule you, can easily lead to comparable blinkeredness. I'm sure Jane will blink from this temporary blinkeredness and snap out of it soon enough, she's just in the weeds a bit, but I think she's still great.

5 comments:

Impertinent Weasel said...

If Obama has a strategy to get a public option passed, then the unsourced doomsaying missives are obviously for naught. Worst case, they were a bit divisive for a while, but everyone will eventually make nice and move on to the next challenge.

But the real risk is that Obama doesn't have any such strategy. In such case, weird divisive demoralizing unsourced gossip-bombs are useless after the fact. They need to be dropped now, often and with impunity. And after all, who's to say whether the public option was, in fact, dying out three weeks ago, and is only now being shocked back to life *because* of the left backlash?

But really, more to the point, why is it that we have to guess at these things anyway? If he really does have strategy for getting a public option passed, it would be nice to have such assurances. Maybe we could all, like, organize to facilitate it or something.

Dale Carrico said...

Yeah, if the campaign taught us anything it's that Obama would leap into an incomparably complex reform effort that has disastrously failed every generation hitherto and that involves fully a sixth of the economy in a time of financial distress without a strategy. Mm hm.

Do you actually hear yourself? Are you ashamed to say such flabbergastingly facile nonsensical things in a public place? I suppose it helps that you are posting under a corwardly pseudonym, but still.

So, to pretend for a moment that your questions are seriously intended: Uh, gee, I don't know why people claim despairingly to have to "guess at truths" when they are so eager to treat unsourced opportunistically leaked claims as equal to official consistent on the record statements by Administration figures to the contrary of the unsourced claims? Neither do I know why perfectly intelligent people seem incapable of distinguishing guiding ideals from best practically possible outcomes, from outcomes that move processes forward compromised step by compromised step.

I do know that those who leap to declarations of Obama evil from the left are exactly as deranging, demoralizing, and divisive to pragmatic progressive process toward actually possibly real-world democratization, social justice, sustainability, and diplomacy as those laughable freaks saying comparably cartoonish things across the Teabagger right.

But I'm sure you're quite right when you predict conspiracy dumb-dumbs will claim that any good outcomes are a direct result of their pre-emptive exposures of their pet conspiracies of the moment come what may.

By the way, I never thought the public option was dead or dying. I for one hoped but didn't expect a PO to come out of the Senate -- I was hoping for a strong PO from the House (where it never looked the least bit dead to anybody paying the least bit of attention) -- and the PO to return after a strong WH push when it actually matters, at year's end. The present state of the process is better than I hoped.

It was important to keep the the Progressive Caucus in line, it was important to make sure Congress knew that individual mandates without competition would be disastrous, given hideous lobbying pressures and class biases of rich representatives, but none of that justifies the surreal sky-is-falling or stealth-evil readings of necessarily ugly sausage making in the service of best outcomes as the process actually moves forward.

I think the dem-netroots are scaling a high learning curve here -- grasping that principled opposition to evil requires a different reasonableness than taking responsibility for actual policy in the midst of stakeholder struggle once you overthrow the killer clowns and assume power.

Impertinent Weasel said...

Believe what you want, I guess. I personally don't see that, for all of your bluster, you have made a case for this 'wait-and-see' posture you seem to be advocating. And you've not come within a hair's breadth of making a case for boycotting the commentary of sensible people writing sensible things from their vantage 'in the weeds,' a vantage which seems to lend more to their credibility than detract.

Dale Carrico said...

Uh, thanks, yes I'll continue to believe what I do for the good reasons I do (and delineate). One wonders what you imagine you are doing beyond the "wait-and-see" you attribute to me. Whining, presumably, to no purpose. Look, either you understand what BooMan is saying in the piece I recommended (and today's posts still perfectly describe what is afoot in my view, including the bad and the ugly) or you don't. Try not to be so dumb, you're wasting my time.

said...

Moi's next blog post may mention conspiracy theories