MIDTERM POST MORTEM

How can a man be so intelligent and educated and yet not get what a mook like me understands?

The sociopaths in the Right Wing regrouped after their 2008 thumping, stuck together (you gotta give them that!) and made their intentions plain. Jim DeMint(R-SC) announced early on that the GOP planned to make health care reform Obama’s “Waterloo.”

Mitch McConnell stated baldly before the election that their number one goal is to make Obama a one term president.

And newly minted Speaker Boehner pronounced their total rejection of any compromise whatsoever. The Republicans will play ball with Obama but only if they can make all the rules and Obama ties his hands behind his back.

Yesterday’s results were really rather predictable given the polls earlier in the year. The public option was wildly popular and many progressives fought very hard for its inclusion in the weak tea that the health reform bill became. When it was clear that the White House had sold reform down the river from the get-go by making a behind-closed-doors deal with the insurance cartel and Big Pharma, many in the base – like me – became very demoralized.

The Democrats had taken all their political capital and squandered it on a weak bill with some good things in it but which also contained the extremely disliked mandate. So the Federal Government was forcing people to buy health insurance from the bastards who were ripping the public off and dropping them from the rolls. A public option would have been the spoonful of sugar to make the mandate go down. But instead, the White House, perhaps in a misguided effort to court Republican support, sacrificed the base.

I was one of the dispirited many who felt very let down, betrayed even. Despite that, I contributed what I could to ActBlue and made phone calls for Harry Reid, Alan Grayson and Joe Sestak. And of course, I voted for Democrats. I would never not vote.

Last night was more than disappointing to me. I felt it was predictable given what a cup of weak tea we’ve been served by the administration. And it’s not just HCR. It’s their support of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the war in Afghanistan, the fact that Guantanamo is still open and Obama’s people are continuing some of the worst offenses of the Bush Regime.

So I guess the whupp-ass the Right Wing delivered yesterday shouldn’t have been shocking. And given how the White House continues to act as if the Republicans are normal people who can be negotiated with instead of the toxic sociopaths they are, I wasn’t surprised when President Obama was conciliatory again today. Which to me just looks like weakness.

I defended this man when Democrats said he was like President Carter – decent, smart but not an effective leader. “But look at his campaign! It’s brilliant!” I said. It was. But the pod people have taken over and turned him into Rodney King. “Can’t we all just get along?”

Well, no, you can’t get along with people whose stated objective is to reduce the Federal Government to a size that can be drowned in a bathtub. They hate the New Deal and are still trying to kill it. They don’t give a flying rat’s ass for the American people, for old people, for poor people, the unemployed. They have no empathy. Let me say it again: THEY ARE SOCIOPATHS. Their sole concern is themselves and their power.

So the President’s behavior, while laudatory in a perfect world, is utterly inadequate to the task. The Republicans have drawn knives and the President is wielding a feather.

If the President is not willing to listen to his base and grow the needed spine, then maybe it’s time to step aside and let us have someone willing to fight for little people like us. Especially in the face of the tsunami of corporate money and the world of hate radio and Fox with their lies and propaganda, drumming their destructive messages 24/7, we need a champion, a leader, someone with guts to stand up for us and against the bullies.

Maybe being a one-term president is the answer. Democrats need someone like Howard Dean or Bernie Sanders or Sherrod Brown or Dennis Kucinich. A fighter. A leader. This isn’t a debate club. We are in the fight of our very lives.