hey there hi there ho there kos-ke-teers...
This post is a reaction/reply/response to this fairly popular TomP diary entry...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
It's not meant to be a rebuttal, Lord knows. But it is meant to suggest that we on the left temper our enthusiasm just a skosh, because, like all things Republican, there are other angles to be played, and we shouldn't be so thrilled by how things appear that we lose sight of how Republicans roll, and how they roll US...
By now, I'm sure you all have either read TomP's diary, or know of the story to which he refers.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/...
A number of Republican Congresspeople, seemingly led by Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) want the left-led attacks on their embrace of Paul Ryan's evil end-Medicare-as-we-know-it to stop. "No mas!" They've written a letter to Obama asking him to talk to their Democratic opponents, and get them to play nice, stop bringing up their vote on Ryan's plan.
Now because we're all over-educated effete snobs, we know what "Schadenfreude" is, and if I assume someone doesn't know what it means, I'm condescending, but if I don't explain it, I'm out of touch. Whew. What a quandary. So, let's just say I wasn't sure how to spell it, so I looked up the spelling online, and gosh I hope as I copy and paste I don't accidentally include the definition oh no!!!
scha·den·freu·de
ˈʃɑdnˌfrɔɪdə Show Spelled[shahd-n-froi-duh]
–noun
satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune.
I think many of us have felt a degree of schadenfreude over this story. The general consensus, to put it politely, is "reap what ye sow, mammajammas." We all remember how many of those Republicans got the gig by lying about their opponents, claiming the Dems were the ones planning to kill Medicare, that Dems were the ones plotting to kill Grandma with death panels, the Dems wanted the terrorists to win, blah blah blah, and they rode that wave of dissatisfaction to victory in the midterms, courtesy of left-leaning voters who stayed home to teach Obama a lesson (whether he learned one or not is open to interpretation) and right leaning voters who thought anything is better than what we've had for the past 2 years, foolishly rewarding those mainly responsible for this situation. So now Republicans want to make nice? Now that we have them "on the ropes?" No mercy!
What's important to remember is that while the Republicans are awful in knowing how to govern, how to ACT - see their budget with no numbers, their jobs report plan with an average of 7 words per page and no plan to create jobs, and a plan to kill Medicare that even a vast majority of Republicans find loathsome - they have been and often still are masters at REACTION. The Republican mind is like a flowchart, and they have an instant response to anything Dems in general and Obama in particular do. Dems come up with a budget, they claim it's a job-killer. Dems embrace a former Republican position (cap-and-trade or mandates for insurance), Republicans tack further right; these ideas are now socialism, Obama breathes in the morning, accuse him of trying to take all the oxygen for himself and his unknown friends in the Middle East. You know the drill. The flowchart fails when something happens for which they were unprepared, see "bin Laden, Death Of." But generally they live or die by the flowchart.
And I think the letter is an attempt to restart the made-with-foreign-labor-by-a-corporation-that-got-tax-incentives-to-send-jobs-overseas engine that is the Republican spin machine.
This letter tends to be win-win situations for the GOP. Will it be this time, I've no idea, but it's what they're shooting for. Note, they sent the letter to OBAMA. Not to Reid and Pelosi, not to the individual Congresspeople hoping to capitalize on their misfortune, but to the President, the man they've spent the past 2+ years telling their constituents that he is unwilling to work with them, on anything (another example of the Republican flowchart, as Obama kept trying to compromise, keep shifting ever rightward and insisting that Obama will not play their game within the parameters of the new goalposts and revised rules). But yet, he's the man they'll run to, Daddy-in-Chief, to get the other siblings to stop being mean to them just because they've Ben-Gay'd their underwear? Really?
The deal as I see or suspect it, is that if the GOP can get some Dems to cave and promise to "play nice" on this issue, they win. But if no one plays nice, they can go to that "liberal media" who is surprisingly generous with their time when it comes to Republicans looking for a platform to complain or hurl accusations, and claim that they tried to reach out to Obama, and "he slapped our hand away," a phrase I believe they used quite often during the healthcare debate because Obama refused to do the gentlemanly thing by capitulating any attempt at healthcare reform and give Sarah Palin the keys to the nuclear football. Even if Obama were to agree (and with his record, it's not an impossibility) and ask Dems to not use the Medicare vote against Republicans, and most Dems agree, if one Democrat, or one non-profit organization working to elect one Democrat, airs one single attack ad bringing up the Medicare vote, THAT will be the ad broken down like the Zapruder film on every Fox News program as evidence that Obama went back on his word, he can't be trusted, and now...NOW the gloves can come off. Because the Republicans have been oh-so-sweet up until now.
The Democrats have seen by and large unified in their refusal to fall for this line of horsecrap, which is refreshingly unusual. I hope they continue to do so, because the letter is just the prop for their show, not the show itself. It is their Trojan Horse, a seemingly goodwill gesture designed to inflict damage when Dems aren't paying attention. It will be discussed by the Beltway Boys, and by and large, I predict they'll agree that Dems deserve SOME degree of blame for the heated rhetoric of late. Sure Republicans lied about Medicare to get into office and they did vote to effectively turn Medicare into something that is NOT Medicare but still CALLED Medicare, but that doesn't mean the Democrats had to accuse them of lying, does it? I hope I'm wrong, time will tell, but it's easy for Dems to hold strong now, that they haven't yet received that sort of blistering criticism. The fact that GOP House members faced an unexpected amount of opposition to their votes during recess town halls must add some steel to the Dems' spines, but heat eventually makes steel bend, and the heat isn't turned their way yet. Here's hoping, but it shouldn't be a blind hope, for any of us. If your rep'd by a Democrat, give 'em a shout and tell them to stay strong, and that you like them more - your wallet likes them more - when they're fighting from a position of strength, and you hate it when they drop the ball. We could very well see the House flip again.
Or we could see the Dems agree to not bring up the Medicare vote ever again. After all, unpleasantness is so unpleasant. And this time, the Republicans promised to be nice to us. It's gotta be true sooner or later, right?
Somewhere, there's a response to that question. On a flowchart.