There's a feeling among certain member of the punditocracy that ObamaCare will pass because it must. The argument is, roughly, that Democrats need to show that they're able to "govern." It could perhaps be argued that merely passing legislation doesn't exactly demonstrate one's ability to run things, but let's leave that point aside. Does the Democratic Party have a vital political interest in passing health care legislation?

I would say yes—no doubt about it. the Democratic Party, as a corporate entity, needs to pass some kind of health care "reform" bill. Failure to do so would damage if not cripple the Obama Administration, besides making the Democratic congressional leadership look weak and ineffective.

But the Democratic Party is not a monolithic corporate entity. The real question is whether or not this argument resonates with doubtful or embattled Democrats in the Senate and particularly the House. With their own political survival on the line, why should they stick out their necks for Obama, Pelosi and Reid?

I believe that the fate of ObamaCare hinges on the credibility of Obama, Pelosi and Reid in the eyes of their own party in Congress. After a year of frustrating, bruising and politically damaging debate, it come down to this in the minds of many congressional Democrats: "What's in this for me?"

Tough question to answer.

Posted by tmg110 at 7:48 AM EST

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Dan Rather on Barack Obama (during an appearance with Chris Matthews on MSNBC):

[P]art of the undertow in the coming election is going to be President Obama's leadership. And the Republicans will make a case and a lot of independents will buy this argument. "Listen he just hasn't been, look at the health care bill. It was his number one priority. It took him forever to get it through and he had to compromise it to death." And a version of, "Listen he's a nice person, he's very articulate" this is what's been used against him, "but he couldn't sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic."

Watermelons! So will Rather be hounded off the air over this prize example of racial insensitivity? Somehow I doubt it. But a question occurs: After the forgery debacle that ended Rather's career at CBS, why is this doofus still on TV?

Posted by tmg110 at 7:35 AM EST

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So President Obama is going reverse the decision of his own Attorney General, Eric Holder, to try the 9/11 conspirators in a New York City civilian court. This is a welcome—if belated—demonstration of common sense from an administration that often seems disconnected from reality on national security issues. And of course, progressives are furious. Check out this full-page New York Times ad from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Photographically morphing St. Barack Obama into the wicked and sinister neofascist war criminal, George W. Bush! If the leaders of the ACLU aren’t careful, they’ll find themselves confined to a cell down in sunny Gitmo.

Posted by tmg110 at 6:36 AM EST

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Ah, the travails of David Axelrod! History isn’t working out as it was supposed to, and President Obama’s head cheerleader is in a snit about it:

In an interview in his office, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.” He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”

These intemperate comments found their way into a New York Times story about the troubles of the Obama Administration. In view of the President’s great need to garner support for his faltering health care “reform” package, they might be considered impolitic. When you’re trying to persuade hesitant Democratic members of Congress to cast a politically dangerous vote on your behalf, ranting about “rampant lack of responsibility” seems contraindicated. Well, Alexrod is by all accounts a genius communicator, so perhaps he knows best.

Axelrod is, indeed, convinced that the White House’s current problems derive from a failure to communicate. If only the right note could be struck in daily briefings, interviews and presidential speeches, America would wake up to the virtue and genius of Barack Obama. That the Obama Administration’s policies lie at the root of then problem is a concept that Axelrod simply cannot hold in his head.

Something else that I found interesting in the story was this note on Alexrod’s lifestyle:

Mr. Axelrod’s friends worry about the toll of his job—citing his diet (cold-cut-enriched), his weight (20 pounds heavier than at the start of the presidential campaign), sleep deprivation (five fitful hours a night), separation from family (most back home in Chicago) and the fact that at 55, he is considerably older than many of the wunderkind workaholics of the West Wing. He wakes at 6 in his rented condominium just blocks from the White House and typically returns around 11.

I find this rather alarming. It’s not good Alexrod—a guy who has the ear of a president—is chronically stressed, emotionally fraught and physically unfit. They used to make fun of Ronald Reagan for keeping regular hours and getting plenty of sleep. Who is really wiser though: the man who intelligently manages his energy budget, or the man who squanders it on 15-hour workdays?

Posted by tmg110 at 11:02 AM EST

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Never mind that California is facing a budget crisis of truly epic proportions.The progressive tax eaters of the People's Republic of Berkeley continue to demand their pounds and pounds of taxpayer flesh:

More Than 1,000 March in Berkeley to Protest Budget Cuts

My favorite bit: During the protest, "UC Berkeley student Corey Scher writes the word 'greed' on an American flag at the corner of Ashby and Telegraph avenues." It seems that young Mr. Scher's expensive college education, the costs of which almost certainly were not paid out of his pocket, has failed to equip him with a sense of irony…

Posted by tmg110 at 7:43 AM EST

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The drive for health-care "reform" has come down to this: a hope that a purely Democratic majority in the House of Representatives can be induced to vote for the bill the Senate passed, with the promise that the many problems with that will will be fixed later via the reconciliation process.

I don't think that's going to happen.

Spooked by the public's negative reaction to ObamaCare, the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts and the President's collapse in the polls, a significant number of House Democrats seem increasingly reluctant to cast a such politically risky vote. I just don't think that they trust Obama and the Senate to bail them out by revising the bill later to remove its most objectionable features. Add in a few progressive House members who think that the bill isn't socialist enough and you've got the making of another Obama debacle.

I understand why the White House and the Democratic congressional leaderships think they have no choice but to ram a bill through by whatever means necessary. But I doubt that they now possess the political capital to get it done.

Posted by tmg110 at 7:30 AM EST

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Posting a review of the novel One Second After reminded me of this Web destination:

The Effects of a Global Thermonuclear War

Wm. Robert Johnston's hypothetical 1988 scenario, presented in the dispassionate language of the social scientist, is truly frightening. An excerpt:

12:00 midnight CDT 5/6 August 1988: The nuclear exchange is generally over. In the U.S. 5,800 warheads detonated totaling 3,900 mt. Soviet and NATO weapons successfully used in Europe numbered 3,300 (1,200 mt) (excluding tactical weapons). About 6,100 warheads (most of them American, but some Chinese, British, and French) exploded in the U.S.S.R. with a total yield of 1,900 mt. Mainland China (P.R.C.) received 900 (detonating) warheads (1,300 mt) from its northern neighbor. Other areas receiving at least a dozen warheads include Canada, North and South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Greenland, Puerto Rico, India, Israel, Australia, Guam, Cuba, Syria, and Egypt. Hundreds of other nuclear weapons have been used in naval combat, in troop combat in West Germany and along the U.S.S.R./P.R.C. border, and in defending the Soviet Union from nuclear attack. About 50% of the global strategic and theater nuclear arsenal has been used. About 10% was launched but did not reach a target and 30% was destroyed on the ground. Altogether, World War III has involved the detonation of 18,000 warheads with a total yield of 8,500 mt. Including tactical weapons, there were 67,000 nuclear weapons in the world a day ago; now, there are 10,000 left.

In the U.S. about 110,000,000 people have died altogether, with the 135,000,000 survivors including 30,000,000 injured. In the U.S.S.R. about 40,000,000 have been killed out of a pre-war population of 285,000,000. Mainland China has had 100,000,000 killed out of a population of 1,090,000,000. Examples of other countries: United Kingdom, 20,000,000 killed (out of 57,000,000); Denmark, 2,700,000 killed (out of 5,100,000); Australia, 3,000,000 killed (out of 16,000,000). In Mexico over 3,000,000 have been killed, mostly in cities on the border with the U.S. Throughout the world about 400,000,000 have died.

These bald statistics, based, as Mr. Johnston notes, on "intelligent speculation," perhaps explain why a nuclear war never actually happened. But this is the possibility with which we lived throughout the Cold War era. Good riddance to those troubled times.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:14 AM EST

Updated: Thursday, 4 March 2010 8:33 AM EST

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This interesting article by Gary Andres in the Weekly Standard analyzes the reasons why Democrats seem intent on passing ObamaCare with razor-thin partisan majorities despite the broad-based opposition of the American people.

Of the four reasons advanced, the two that seem most plausible to me are (a) peak majority and (b) base preservation. The idea behind (a) is that the Democratic congressional majority has reached its peak and is set to decline. So it's now or never for health care "reform." As for (b), it's driven by concern about the reaction of the party's progressive base if ObamaCare flops. What could be more demoralizing for progressive activists who've invested so many hopes in the Obama Administration? Wouldn't they desert the Democrats in droves?

How such considerations might influence individual Democrats in Congress, who may not be particularly progressive and have their personal political survival to worry about, remains to be seen. Would they really be willing to initial their own electoral death warrants for the sake of such theories? Well, we're about to find out…

Posted by tmg110 at 7:55 AM EST

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Defeat may be an orphan—but theories explaining defeat have the support of an enormous extended family.

Progressives are wringing their hands and rending their garments over the manifest failure of the Obama presidency to live up to its promise of hope and change. What went wrong? As usual in such situations, fingers are being pointed in every direction. It’s all Rahm Emanuel’s fault. No, it isn’t Emanuel’s fault—he’s the West Wing’s sole voice of reason. All right, then, it’s those dastardly, obstructionist Republicans. Oh, but wait, with healthy Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the GOP is in no position to obstruct anything. OK, then it must be the dumb, ungrateful American people. And so it goes, with increasing shrillness of tone, to the great delight and amusement of conservatives like me.

It’s obvious, of course, why progressives have fallen into such a snit. The answer to their question is staring them in the face, every time they behold the President’s visage on a computer monitor or TV screen. Barack Obama is what went wrong—because he was never right to begin with.

On the tabula rasa that was candidate Obama, progressives inscribed all their fondest hopes. Free health care for all! Green jobs! Social justice! World peace! An end to American exceptionalism! The French will like us again! In the eyes of people for whom patriotism is so fifteen minutes ago, Obama looked like the answer to their (strictly secular) prayers. Hence the adulation with which his candidacy was received. Even members of his campaign staff, who surely ought to have known better, got into the habit of calling him “black Jesus.”

The real guy, alas, isn’t much of a Messiah. He's pretty second-rate, in fact. But this is forbidden knowledge that would make progressives feel really stupid if they took it in, so a scapegoat is necessary. Maybe Rahm, or maybe Nancy and Harry, or maybe those GOP rats, or maybe the whole lousy American people—but it can’t be Barack Obama. It just can’t.

Posted by tmg110 at 7:23 AM EST

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Great historical turning points are sometimes obvious only in retrospect. For those living through the history in question, a turning point can be passed with little notice. This may just have happened in the case of the Obama presidency.

The thing about turning points is that there's no turning back from them. When Lee lost at Gettysburg, the fate of the Confederacy was sealed. When Nixon approved the Watergate cover-up, he destroyed his presidency. History permits no do-overs.

Barack Obama may in fact have ruined his own presidency by the manner in which he made himself president. Presenting himself to gullible voters as a post-partisan national savior, he raised expectations to a stratospheric level that he and his administration never had a hope of meeting. More than one year into his tenure, the oceans have not receded, the terrorists have not beaten their suicide vests into iPods, and the atmosphere in Washington is more virulently partisan than ever. Even so, had he followed a sensible, moderate course, the President could have recouped. But sensible and moderate are two words that no objective observer would use in describing the Obama Administration. Instead we have witnessed hubris harnessed to incompetence. And now we see their inevitable result.

I think that future historians will cite the first three months of 2010 as the time of turning that ruined Barack Obama's presidency. The failure his his grandiose health care "reform," the collapse of climate alarmism, and the impending graduation of Iran to the status of a nuclear power refute every premise on which the Obama Administration is founded. I'd be glad to be proved wrong—Obama is President of the United States, after all, and his fate is to some extent ours. But I'm pretty sure that he's blown it. And the only thing that surprises me, frankly, is how little time it took him to screw everything up.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:52 AM EST

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