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The Moderate Republican: An Endangered Species
Boy, the Republicans know how to make Barack Obama look good. What are they going to do now, threaten to repeal a law that forces insurance companies to cover the sick? Or block the provision that allows you to keep your out-of-work kids on your policy until they are 26? Whatever the failings of the bill-and they are real, especially in the area of cost control-its proponents will clearly have an advantage over those left bemoaning the loss of the untenable status quo. Particularly so during the first years, when its very sensible restraints on the insurance industry go into effect.
The bill that the president signed into law is limited and hardly provocative, but it unquestionably gets us over the first huge hurdle, already surmounted by every other economically advanced nation, to finally regard health coverage as a societal obligation. We already do with the rules governing admittance to hospital emergency rooms, but now that obviously humane assurance carries the majesty of landmark law. For that achievement, Obama and the Democrats who supported him have secured their marker in the nation's history, and the Republicans, without exception, should be remembered only as wannabe spoilers.
As Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, observed correctly in holding his nose and casting a vote for a bill that is at best a work in need of much progress, it is "castor oil," which may not do much to improve our health but certainly won't make it worse. It's also pro-business; that's why the stock market boomed Tuesday in a 17-month-high rally led by a 4.1 percent rise in the value of Caterpillar, the company that claimed the bill would hurt business interests.
Quite the opposite, actually, and even the health industry will do very well. Just as the auto insurance companies benefit from the requirement that all drivers have insurance, the health industry will have plenty of opportunity to make profits off the broad new market of captive consumers with no serious threat of effective government cost controls. The public option that might have provided an attractive cost-control alternative has been banished, and it won't take the health insurance companies long to figure out how to game those new insurance exchanges to increase profits.
This is a bill that an Eisenhower Republican of old would have gleefully endorsed, following the lead of the American Medical Association and the hospital industry, but such moderates no longer exist in the GOP. If they did, they would have backed this bill and claimed its very limited stab at health reform as their own. Instead, they are now recast as tea party zealots and naysayers, and while that may bring a short-term electoral advantage, in the long run it defines the GOP as incapable of moderate governance.
Watching those Republican state attorneys general pressing their states' rights claim to overturn this bill, you had to wonder whether they were unaware that many of the 16 million now to be covered by an expanded Medicaid live in the states they claim to represent. Have they checked with hospital directors in the poverty centers of Florida and Louisiana to see if they truly don't want the feds to help cover the uninsured poor they are now legally required to treat?
The immediate impact of the law is that, from the moment of the president's signing, state governments will be prevented from cutting their Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Programs (CHIP). Arizona just did the latter, resulting in a loss of insurance for 47,000 kids in low-income families. Since that state's senior senator, John McCain, is so upset with this bill's passage, will he now have the honesty to boast that Arizona may have gotten its version of health reform in under the wire before Obamacare could save insurance for his home state's children?
For progressives, the preservation of existing Medicaid and CHIP rules until the new system is fully operational in 2014, as well as the expansion of Medicaid to an additional 16 million needy souls, should be sufficient to regard this new law as progress. It's a pity that not a single Republican in Congress could evince a similar pragmatism, despite the stunning victory of anti-choice forces in securing the president's sweeping executive order. Of course, the smart but evidently elusive rational political course for Republicans would have been to crow over the new law's summary rejection of a public option and claim that as their own win.
As it is, however, the lock-step march of the Republicans in radical resistance to even the most modest proposals to heal a deeply ailing nation leaves the Democrats as the only party that matters. The Republicans are a party of incoherent rage, and while they might temporarily succeed as demagogues, they are now acknowledged strangers to fact and logic-not to mention compassion.
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Show AllObama -- the best Republican president since Clinton.
The Republicans showed their cards in February 2009 when they pushed Democrats to load the stimulus legislation with tax cuts that wouldn't stimulate anything...then the Republicans all voted against it.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me?
Had Obama and the Congressional Democrats wanted real health care reform they had the votes to make it happen. Instead they opted for a repeat of the Republicans' stimulus legislation strategy and steered health care reform into a corporate welfare program that further entrenches and empowers the drug and insurance industries that created the need for health care reform in the first place.
While the Democrats blame the Repugs for all that is wrong with Obamacare, the events of the past year have clearly shown that the Democrats started selling health care reform down the river as soon as the votes were counted in November 2008.
Now that Rahm is using Rove's play book, it is getting harder to find moderate DEMOCRATS. Just as Rove demanded that all Republicans move to the right in 2001, Rahm is now demanding that all Democrats move to the right.
I don't know how Robert Scheer can claim the passage of this bill made the stock market rise. The stock market can rise when we get good news, and it can also rise when we get bad news. It can rise when the day is sunny or on a day it rains. The stock market is fickle.
"The stock market is fickle."
IMHO, the stock market is rigged, not fickled.
Scheer's point is that the "health care" industry loves Obamacare even though they have been playing Brer Rabbit's please don't throw me in the briar patch game for the past year.
Exactly!
People need to stop being so guileless and look beyond Republican/Democrat scam. After over 40 years of voting, I've come to the conclusion that the two parties collude in order to keep the duopoly alive and strong. They take turns, they orchestrate the "battles." When we stick to the facts, ignore the theater, Democrats are no better than Republicans. Their agenda is just about identical and it is moving forward at quite a clip. Obamba is a corporate shill, a military aggressor, no different than Bush. People suffer because US citizens seem to prefer to live in the dark.
Speaking of moderate Republicans -- and, today, I'm not sure how Paul Craig Roberts categorizes himself politically, but I just left www.counterpunch.org, and unless I am mistaken, Paul Craig Roberts may have just written his final column, titled, "Good Bye," although I hope not. He has been one of the very few truth-tellers through the past several years, and there are few these days who consistently cut through the crap, offering a view from the inside so that we readers can understand what we feel and know to be verity, but to which we are not privy.
For a very long time, each day, I have searched through the counterpunch articles to see if Paul Craig Roberts has a new column. As far as I'm concerned, he stands with a few other writers, like Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, etc., both of whom are published on CD. But, where is Paul Craig Roberts?
To read Good Bye go to:
www.counterpunch.org
If you are a regular reader and look forward to his articles, you can reach him at:
PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Kay,
The "Good Bye" article says..
"And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution..."
Roberts' credibility slips if he embraces the AGW deniers.
I can't really add to Rich's quality post above, but I'll say that it's vital to not expect everyone to agree with everything all the time. PCR has been an authentic challenge to the corporate state coming from the right, and he's still a conservative, and holds some more traditionally conservative positions. That doesn't mean that he's a bad person or that he's always wrong. Of all people, anyone in the Left should have learned this lesson by now.
As for PCR's "retirement", I have an inside source that says it's authentic. He's probably retiring. It's no shock, either. Like Hedges, he's been exiled to the wilderness for years and has gotten increasingly despondent over how useless this cycle of choir-preaching has been in terms of mobilization. His writing's been darker and darker for a few years running, and I like that he concluded what he did. These guys that turn on the establishment, while not economically suffering like those of us at or near the economic bottom, suffer greatly in different ways. To be a pariah among one's peers is no small matter.
For a leftist to admire Reagan on ECONOMIC policy, you have to economically and politically illiterate. That would be the equivalent of a right winger applying a marxist analysis to economics.
Exactly. There are certain mix'n'match choices possible so that 'leftists' can sympathize with right-wing individuals and ideas (lots of modern 'leftists' have a certain respect for Eisenhower, for instance). But a 'leftist' admiring Reagan on economic policy!!?? Ridiculous. That 'leftist' is a f....g moron, period. There are limits!
While the new health insurance bill forbids some of the worst corporate outrages it does nothing to end the everyday outrages such as charging 8 dollars for an aspirin pill or a bandaid. All it does is force the federal government to pay for these ripoffs. If the states are all going broke, how are they going to pay for the increase in children's coverage and Medicaid if the feds continue their policy of not bailing out the states?
This is true. The most obvious example of greed in the medical world is insurance, but it is rampant in hospitals, clinics, and doctors' offices across the country. For example, I had a complication from a procedure I had done 12 years ago. About a week later, on a Sunday, it started hurting, and I went to the nearest hospital (I was not near home). I saw the doctor for two minutes. He told me to take aspirin and to go back and see the original doctor who did the procedure. The hospital sent me a bill for over $100. I received many bills, and didn't ever pay it. I eventually told a high level hospital administrator they may as well stop sending bills, because since they didn't do anything at all, I was never going to pay, and they finally agreed to stop hassling me.
-"The bill that the president signed into law is limited and hardly provocative, but it unquestionably gets us over the first huge hurdle, already surmounted by every other economically advanced nation, to finally regard health coverage as a societal obligation. "
Does it? For example the new law phases in new regulations that prevents you from being cut of for preexisting conditions, but they can still raise prices as much as they want, correct? So, if they raies rates until you can't pay the price to cover that life saving procedure, is your neighbour going to pay?
The private for profit companies are still at the centre of your system. They will of course game the regulations and maximize profits. You don't have a simple law that says society has a responsability to care for everyone. You have a slightly revised mishmash of unregulated and profit driven insurance firms that have a responsability to make money.
When the next congress cuts regulations and defunds programs, how are you going to be any further ahead? I don't see how for all the hair pulling by Republicans, and cheering by Democrats, how you can say that a hurdle has been surmounted. Rates are still going up, up, not down. Last I checked, other countries pay less, much less for access to medicine than Americans do. So I don't think it will be long before you do begin to question your jubilation.
Several things in this article irritate me.
The Republicans have been acting irrationally and antisocially for a long time. If there were a few moderate Repubs, it would change nothing and be another example of 'kabuki theatre'. What they did re this terrible bill is nearly irrelevant; it's the Dems who wasted all this time and gave us nothing.
Every time I read another opinion about how the HCR bill/law is 'flawed' but 'is a beginning, is a step in the right direction, will help X million Americans', etc., I reject that view. There is a very large bandwagon now of pundits with this opinion, but I am not and will not be swayed by their words. The majority of Americans wanted much more. This was not a place and time for compromise and reconciliation; access to quality medical care is a basic human right.
And no, progressives should not regard this law as "progress". Don't tell us what progressives should think. That's the whole point of being progressive; we ourselves decide what we think, and also, we actually care about others.
Based on what you write here, I don't think you really care that much about others. There are millions of poor people who will be covered by this bill, including children. That's enough to say it's progress right there, despite its flaws.
I'm willing to bet you won't be satisfied with any bill until it's single payer which means you don't really care about the millions who will die while you play that waiting game. I assume you wanted this bill killed which would mean another 20 years at least before any politician, let alone political party, took up any kind of health care fight again.
Your attitudes work against progress.
My comment was: based on what the poster had written, I don't see the concern for others.
Here's how someone who actually cared about more than their own pretentious opinion might write a comment:
I'm not thrilled with this bill but I do like the fact that 30 million of my fellow Americans will now have some type of health insurance. It's obvious to me that single payer is the best system by far but it was pretty clear that when dicks like Lieberman and Ben Nelson won't even vote for a watered down public option, that single payer is still a ways off. This bill is a first step but we've got a long way to go to really transform health care in this country.
Now, a post like that would tell me that the poster is living in the real world and isn't simply circle-jerking a bunch of left wing extremists on Common Dreams. The thing that irritates me most about the right is not that they disagree with me but when they don't even argue from a realistic point of view. I am equally irritated by those same qualities on the left. There is no attempt by most posters on this site to even acknowledge certain political realities or that, to talk specifically about Obama, he's actually the President of an entire country, not just Noam Chomsky's mailing list. Your style of "persuasion" is not convincing anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
Tramaker, your recurrent primitive Talking Points are a pathetic attempt to leapfrog over your interlocutor(s) and assert otherwise nonexistent superiority.
In game parlance, "one-upmanship".
To better conceal such naked guilt-tripping, you might want to mix in a positive talking point-- here, many apologists for the insurance corporation bailout have made great use of the report that 59,000 Amerikan nuns defied Vatican authority and signed a petition in favor of the atrocity.
That way, you have a chance of pinning your interlocutor into a double-whammy of being sociopathically indifferent to the sufferings of others AND too recalcitrant to be inspired by the wisdom and courage of saints.
The audience here is generally a little too sharp to succeed with such rank manipulation, but it's worth a shot.
Incidentally, the merits of your argument are so negligible as to make rebuttal unnecessary-- taking two steps backwards into quicksand vitiates the prospect of future "step(s) forward". It might feel like "progress" to you, but it's actually more like "moonwalking".
Obedient:
Congratulations on the graduate degree. May your circle jerk continue.
Best wishes,
Tramaker
Again another DUMBASS!!! democratic apologist heard from the peanut gallery.
"D"
The party of NO has backed itself into a pretty tight corner. They must embrace the tea baggers, for they are just about all they have left. Racial and misogynistic bigotry now define them as a party. How's that hopey changey thing workin' out for ya you hateful monsters? Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of thugs!
As the great Elmer Fudd might say, "Weplace widiculous Wepublican wascals..."
Moderate Republicans are long extinct and can easily be replaced by moderate Democrats but the real endangered species are progressive Democrats and our last one Dennis Kucinich went the way of the dodo bird. Why worry about moderate Republicans, assuming they actually exist, going on the endangered species list when progressives in Washington are going extinct with the last of them chickening out on the last minute and losing his mind on drumming up support for this bad bill?
"losing his mind on drumming up support for this bad bill?"
He hasn't lost his mind, for heaven's sake! He is doing what the money tells him to do. What do you think, he didn't realize the insurance industry would expect a political payback for all the moola they gave him?
And he hasn't lost his mind on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, drones and the like. Do you think the defense industry gave him all that money so he could pull the rug out from underneath the brutal agenda of the US empire.
and the financial industry, lots of money to Obama.
True, money had a part to play but Kucinich held up his fight for single payer for the longest time in Congress before he finally caved in. I was only guessing that other progressives in Congress who cosponsored HR 676, Feingold, and Sanders had backed out earlier thereby depriving Kucinich of the support he needed to bring single payer to the table. When someone is trying to fight a good cause and even his or her best backers chicken out, what can that last person standing do? I don't forgive Kucinich choosing to go mad and not only concede to the bad bill but also going bonkers and destroying his own progressive credentials by drumming up support for a regressive bill that goes against everything he stood for all these years. I can understand the mental insanity when someone gets very unhappy and does the "if you can't beat them join them" set of actions. What he did was wrong and unforgivable but the biggest lesson that progressives and liberals have yet to learn from this tragic defeat on single payer and other progressive/liberal causes that have also faced defeat is to be self-confident, build your team or coalition for the cause, don't let anyone who joins back down, and go on the offensive and build support.
I thought Kucinich voted no on all the bills related to the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and all. Which bills are you referring to where he voted yes on?
I don't think Republicans are interested in being populists anymore. They are interested in being in charge, and will enlist corporate interests and Tea Partiers to put them in charge regardless of the popular will. This is a turn toward Fascism, and the only ironic circumstance in it will be that once the Republicans 'temporarily' recind our democracy for our own good, they will find themselves likewise booted from power by something far more evil.
I see something like a Pinochet future for America.
The lame resort to labeling political groupings as "endangered species" should terminate the discussion as surely as a violation of Godwin's Law.
"The Republicans are a party of incoherent rage, and while they might temporarily succeed as demagogues, they are now acknowledged strangers to fact and logic-not to mention compassion."
Reagenomics trickle down theory has failed Americas middle class,,,
But trickle up has made mega corporations and 2 percent of the good old boy elite network of crooks very rich,,,
Its all over, the middle class is making it back the hard way, with truth to power and the vote.
Its only taken 30 years, and the devastation of the middle class in its wake.
Let us please retire the word "moderate" as commonly used in American politics.
There is no moderation in supporting the largest debt in world history, 3 simultaneous hot wars, hundreds of dollars of largesse to gamblers, or reductions in public health and education designed only to steepen economic hierarchy.
No one in American politics who claims the term uses moderation.
There are some excellent things in this bill.
Forcing someone to do business with unethical & immoral healthcare companies at the end of a gun barrel isn't one of them.
This bill only leaves Washington money--money that could have been used for the care of its people and to rebuild our infrastructures--to continue to wage war on the world. Is that okay with you Robert? Michael? Bill? Jon? Or the rest of you democratic apologists in the media?
Most of us here know, that when it comes to war, murder, assassinations, pillaging and overall criminality, there is no difference in the republicans and democrats. They are both one in the same, only their assigned tastes for evil differs, albeit slightly.
For simplicity's sake, let me put it this way: On one hand, one uses its power here at home to place a face of goodness on the state's behavior, invoking names like King, Kennedy and Gandhi--while behind the scenes, they devise plans necessary to scrape up money for their main body of work: war and empire. When that is done, the other party simply comes in through the door disguised as an "election" and proceeds to ramp up their constituent's rage with flags and AM radio, then turns on the faucet of war. A very simple overview I know, but I think its more or less the way it works.
They both do their assigned work so well. Its a great system. A great dance. Call it The Dance of War. A tango, if you will. The "American Tango".
When it comes to humanity, or lack of it, there is no difference is the democrats and republicans. They are both guilty of crimes against humanity.
Stop this madness of thinking otherwise, they are both murderers.
Fascist Republican America:
"Fascist America: Are We There Yet?
by Sara Robinson, OurFuture.org
www.commondreams.org/, August 9, 2009
Fascism only grows in the disturbed soil of a mature democracy in crisis. Paxton suggests that the Klu Klux Klan, which formed in reaction to post-Civil War Reconstruction, may in fact be the first authentically fascist movement in modern times. Almost every major country in Europe sprouted a proto-fascist movement in the wretched years following WWI (when the Klan enjoyed a major resurgence here as well) -- but most of them stalled either at this first stage, or the next one.
As Rick Perlstein documented in his two books on Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, modern American conservatism was built on these same themes. From "Morning in America" to the Rapture-ready religious right to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various gradients of racist groups, it's easy to trace how American proto-fascism offered redemption from the upheavals of the 1960s by promising to restore the innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America. This vision has been so thoroughly embraced that the entire Republican party now openly defines itself along these lines. At this late stage, it's blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage. Worse: it doesn't have a moment's shame about any of it. No apologies, to anyone. These same narrative threads have woven their way through every fascist movement in history."
..."deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."
And more ominously: "The most important variables...are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."
That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.
When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to full-fledged government fascism -- begins.
The third stage: being there_All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.
Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."
This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.
This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it."
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/FascistAmer_AreWeThere%3F.html
Thanks for referring to the earlier article by Sara Robinson. I've only been online a few weeks. There's lots of work to do !
WOW, what a well-written article - both style and substance. Thanks for posting it, Ezeflyer.
Wealth recruiting the very people on whose backs they've made and make their fortunes to do their violent bidding reminds me of a native tragedy. I forget if it was Cochise or Geronimo, but one of them said they never minded being displaced or killed by whites. What broke his back and spirit was when he was told that the army who eventually tracked down his band was led by fellow Apaches.
The Republicans time has come. Time to shuffle off to Buffalo. That is why they are so angry. They are terrified. They know their time is coming to an end. Bye, bye.
Be cautious laughing about people only interested in naked power. Sociopaths don't believe in rules or fairness. Read a history of how the Nazi party arose in Germany, starting as a small and scoffed-at cult, if you haven't lately.
Who needs moderate Republicans when you have Democrats? You've got your choice: callous corporatism or compassionate corporatism. Choose your poison.
Congressman Boehner: Resign Now!
Boehner called Ohio Congressman Steve Driehas a dead man for voting for health care. A day or two later the Congressman and his family's life was threatened. Boehner needs to be censured and forced to resign. This vituperative, cowardly and intimidating behavior encourages violence and cannot be tolerated.
The Republicans have made themselves a party of pariahs- corporate minions who serve only one purpose- to fill their campaign coffers, dupe the American people and destroy the social fabric. They are subverting a branch of government- and the majority has a constitutional duty to stop this behavior in it tracks. Sore losers, prima donnas and pouters. Despicable and Detestable.