Bob Herbert has an excellent column in today's NYT that appeared to have escaped notice at the time I started drafting this diary. He pulls no punches from the start:
Maybe the economic stress has been too much. Looking back at the past few months, it’s fair to wonder if the country isn’t going through a nervous breakdown.
The political debate has been poisoned by birthers, deathers and wackos who smile proudly while carrying signs comparing the president to the Nazis. People who don’t even know that Medicare is a government program have been trying to instruct us on the best ways to reform health care.
Herbert goes on to note the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the GOP:
There is no end to the craziness. The entire Republican Party has decided that it is in favor of absolutely nothing. The president’s stimulus package? No way. Health care reform? Forget about it.
There is not a thing you can come up with that the G.O.P. is for. Sunshine in the morning? Harry Reid couldn’t persuade a single Senate Republican to vote yes.
Incredibly, the party’s poll numbers are going up.
While Herbert doesn't mention it, his column raises, once again, the question of why the Dems have now wasted 8 months trying to practice "bipartisanship" w/ the GOP. When parties enter into a negotiation process on any topic, there's a presumption that there is some common ground, however, slight, between the parties. What common ground exists here w/ the GOP?
Only 3 Goopers combined in 2 houses voted for the Stim. A few weeks later, 1 of the 3 switched parties b/c he faced certain defeat in a primary next year. The other 2 come from ME. IOW, there's not a single Gooper in 49 states who thought it was necessary to pass a stimulus package in the face of the worst economic crisis in 7 decades. Even worse, none of them would do so even though the Dems cut aid to state govts and increased the tax cut portion of the Stim in a conscious effort to draw GOP support.
As Herbert also notes, the rhetoric from the other side has gotten totally out of control. The same people who told us for 7 years that we needed to march in lockstep behind W/Cheney in the "GWOT" did a 180 on 1/20/09:
We need therapy. President Obama is planning to address the nation’s public school students today, urging them to work hard and stay in school. The folks who bray at the moon are outraged. Some of the caterwauling on the right has likened Mr. Obama to Chairman Mao (and, yes, Hitler), and a fair number of parents have bought into the imbecilic notion that this is an effort at socialist or Communist indoctrination.
As one father from Texas put it: "I don’t want our schools turned over to some socialist movement."
The wackiness is increasing, not diminishing, and it has a great potential for destruction. There is a real need for people who know better to speak out in a concerted effort to curb the appeal of the apostles of the absurd.
One of the few times last fall that I respected McCain was when he contradicted the woman who claimed at a campaign appearance that Obama is a Muslim. While his running mate spent the GE campaign fanning the flames w/ comments about Obama "palling around w/ terrorists," McCain was willing, on that occasion, to pour a little water on them. Since the election, however, the GOP has, at best, ignored the flames and, at worst, fanned them even more.
Grassley's "death panel" comments demonstrated the lack of seriousness w/ which the GOP views public debates. Grassley apparently forgot that one of his own GOP Senate colleagues proposed including end of life counseling in HCR. He was willing to score cheap political points by consciously distorting a legislative provision at a time when he was nominally engaging in high level good-faith negotiations about the bill in which the provision was to be incorporated.
Herbert goes on to note the continuing lack of urgency in the face of a severe unemployment crisis:
Nearly 15 million Americans are unemployed, according to official statistics. The real numbers are far worse. The unemployment rate for black Americans is a back-breaking 15.1 percent.
Five million people have been unemployed for more than six months, and the consensus is that even when the recession ends, the employment landscape will remain dismal. A full recovery in employment will take years. With jobless recoveries becoming the norm, there is a real question as to whether the U.S. economy is capable of providing sufficient employment for all who want and need to work.
This is an overwhelming crisis that is not being met with anything like the urgency required.
There is little to add there except to note that Herbert's paper had a FP article on Sunday that showed that Wall Street is up to old tricks already. After hundreds of billions of our $ were spent and a couple trillion were committed to its rescue, the Street now intends to package life insurance policies taken out by the elderly and the infirm the same way that it used to package subprime mortgages.
Wall Street has clearly learned nothing from the financial debacle that its greed, its arrogance, and its shortsightedness imposed on all of us. Now that the public purse has protected its supply, it plans on imbibing just as heavily as before. The unemployed, the underemployed, and kids in seriously undefunded schools can fend for themselves.
It's not a pretty picture, but it's a vastly more accurate one than one is likely to get from most any MSM source these days. It's one that needs to be studied by everyone in the WH and by every Hill Dem. If Team Obama really looks to change the political dynamic starting this week, accepting Herbert's awful truths will help them to do so.