The classic stages of mourning are described as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
After the 2008 election, Republicans were in shock and denial. The Tea Partiers initiated a season of vitriolic anger that has not yet gone away, but Republicans in Congress started fake bargaining not long ago with various attempted poison pill amendments to the Health Care bills, including the Stupak amendment on abortion. Since then they have said over and over that they would negotiate on Health Care as long as the Democrats would scrap everything and start over. And they have been repeating more and more bare-faced, outrageous lies that the Base wants to believe, regardless of facts. Not just the Death Panels of the summer, or that they really, really want to help with Health Care as they do everything they can think of to kill it. Because as Bill Kristol and Orrin Hatch have explained, A successful Health Care bill is doom for Republicans.
The next round, tomorrow, will be a circus at the Obama bipartisan Health Care summit, to be held at Blair House. I don't know what anybody will say, but I do know that the outrageous lies will not only continue but escalate, as they have been all last year.
But something else interesting is happening. Democrats are showing signs of spines.
First, here are links to some earlier posts on this subject by me and gongee
A Tale of Republican Mourning
Death of GOP; Republicans in mourning
Republicans in Mourning 3: Bargaining
C-SPAN 3 and Fox promise to show the whole summit. C-SPAN will replay everything later. There will be an MSNBC special about the whole thing tomorrow evening.
I'm sure that I don't have to tell Kossacks about Republican lies, or about the fake bargains they offer. It's in diaries here, it's on MSNBC, and on Huffington Post, and Talking Points Memo, and FireDogLake, and YouTube, and many other sites.
And I'm sure that Kossacks have noticed Harry Reid becoming positive about reconciliation, and two dozen Senators signing on for the Public Option. The press has become very, very gradually more assertive about calling Republican lies, lies since 2006, but it is clearly accelerating now that the President also says so—with the greatest politeness and, as they say in the Senate, collegiality. Keith Olbermann was absolutely ferocious tonight about the Republicans who give him a hard time about his father being in the hospital for months, claiming that Olbermann was using his father's multiple brushes with death as an "excuse" not to appear at a Tea Party event. You have to see it to believe it. And did you hear Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) call the Republican Party a "wholly-owned subsidiary of the insurance industry"? It was on both Olbermann and Maddow tonight.
But not all of the Democrats have gotten the memo from Bill Kristol explaining what we are fighting against on the Republican side. Many are still intimidated by the Republicans. The public wants what LBJ originally proposed: Medicare for all, as in the Canadian program that we were copying. If we get it, we slaughter the Republicans and the Tea Partiers in November, and depression can really set in. But the President left the Public Option completely out of his proposal for tomorrow.