(Via Publius Forum) This article on the coming Great Netroot Betrayal by the President on health care can’t be for real: it’s too perfect a stereotype of the Aging White Liberal Boomer. From the generally aggrieved and petulant tone to the dreadlocks; from the need to politicize the personal to the need to personalize the political; and from the familiarity toward believed friends to the ugly hatred towards perceived enemies; it’s like Anne Lamott fell out of the Lefty Tropes Tree and hit every branch on the way down.
If you doubt that, read this paragraph:
We did not know exactly how you [President Barack Obama] would proceed to restore our beloved Constitution. It seemed beyond redemption, like my kitchen floor did briefly last week after my dog, Bodhi, accidentally ate 24 corn bread muffins. You said you would push back your sleeves and begin, that it would take all of us working harder than we ever had before, but that you would lead. While acknowledging the financial and moral devastation of the last eight years, you said you would start by giving your people healthcare. You would do battle with the conservatives and insurance companies. You said in your beautiful way many times that this was the overarching moral and spiritual issue of our times, and we understood this to mean that you took this to be your Selma, your Little Rock.
If I was writing a parody of the type, this is the paragraph that I would write to clue everybody in that it was all a joke. I mean, come on: naming the dog “Bodhi?” That’s perfect absurdity.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to Moe Lane.
Moe Lane
Steve Maley
Dan McLaughlin
Neil Stevens
Daniel Horowitz
I guess the little leftists are disillusioned with the PHARMA deal?...
JadedByPolitics (Diary) Friday, August 28th at 3:32PM EST (link)I guess they really thought that he was different that coming from Chicago that he was not a political beast who was going to use everyone and everything including big business to get what he wants. Little idiots!
Unified Patriots – How-To:
Activists Taking Action
So now even dogs have no control over what they do?
janis (Diary) Friday, August 28th at 3:47PM EST (link)Her dog “accidentally” ate 24 corn muffins. I’m going out on the behavioral limb here and declaring that that mutt scarfed those muffins down as fast as he could before his owner’s head quit spinning and spitting green pea soup. I defy anyone here to eat two dozen cornbread muffins in 10 minutes or less and not throw up everywhere.
Cut her some slack, janis.
blooch Friday, August 28th at 9:04PM EST (link)The dog had eaten all of her special brownies earler that day, except for the dozen she ate before writing that article.
“Lieutenant Dike wasn’t a bad leader because he made bad decisions. He was a bad leader because he made no decisions.”
I think I tried to read one of her books, once
Obis_Sister (Diary) Friday, August 28th at 8:49PM EST (link)About half-way through, I thought – what a nutjob – and put the book in the yard-sale.
Unfinished.
Obi’s Sister
www.justgrits.wordpress.com
aggrieved petulance indeed
jchoulihan (Diary) Friday, August 28th at 9:31PM EST (link)I have no idea why I read this tonight; the writing here was so good, so apt, that this liberal had to read the original (as much as I could bear) by Anne. Good god, it was frightening — the overweening vanity, the self indulgence. My fellow liberals are making me so crazy in their hyperbolic self-absorption – so off course from what liberal humanism was supposed to mean in my view — that I am now lapsing into conservative sites. Health care and Obama? Post partisanship was his most appealing message, and one that he is failing monumentally. In my view, Republicans are generally tone deaf to the concerns bubbling among the electorate – growing income disparities that left the middle class churning in place and health care costs were among these. I may have missed it, but it seemed that they did little. Into the abyss of an unacknowledged problems, we get swept into the typical overreach and hubris of Democratic “solutions.” We need Republicans with an ear for what troubles us and Democrats with a sense of self restraint and humility. I read an interesting piece recently, which I will paraphrase too simply: that conservatives are driven primarily by a desire for liberty; liberals by a desire for fairness. I think the health care debate has hardened around those two poles. I suspect that there is a pragmatic, disciplined, and still humane response to the problem out there, but I doubt it can be arrived out without real bipartisanship. None of this is helped along by the drivel of Anne Lamott. As a writer, who works relentlessly hard, it is discouraging to see such nonsense published — from either side of the fence. Well, I have a cat named Baby Raindrop, but at least I don’t have dredlocks and can manage to round up several hundred head of cattel on my own. Embarrassed liberal.
Remember that 'fairness' equals 'control'
speciallist (Diary) Friday, August 28th at 11:24PM EST (link)Liberals want to control..
Liberty needs no further explanation…
control
jchoulihan (Diary) Saturday, August 29th at 4:57PM EST (link)Quite possibly. It certainly seems true of this Administration and of much in liberalism today. Nonetheless, the argument that I made was put forward by a conservative columnist at NRO, Mark Goldblatt. I’m sorry that I can’t find the link. He is a philosopher and great writer.
I think that it is also true, however, that the founding of this country was as much about fairness as liberty — “no taxation without representation”. I don’t know how to separate one value from the other in that proclamation. It’s possible that the Repubic has been in a constant state of tension between those two values. I don’t know if we were ever more civil to one another than we manage today, but our persistence in seeing these as separate rather than intermingled is self-defeating.
The current health care reform bill simply cannot be defeated by conservatives alone; it will require blue dog Democrats and even disenfranchised liberals such as myself. So, which do you care about more? Being a pure conservative or having a public option foisted upon you?
There is an excellent critique of the public option on a feminist website Femisex, which also looks at the pathetic — truly pathetic and proganda filled telephone town halls of Nita Lowey in NY. If I were a Republican, this would be of interest to me. I think the title of the piece is Nita Lowey: Democracy AWOL. Many of us in that district are now organizing against her, and as I have several friends on the Republican side of the fence on the Hill, I hope to appeal to the RNCC to put up a viable candidate against her.
Those of us who respond strongly to the idea of fairness are capable of responding equally to the idea of liberty. Most of my friends in the ranch community would prefer that I stop referring to myself as a liberal, as they think that I am too “fair-minded” (note the fair) and reasonable to call myself one. My fair mindedness urges me to address the cause of people with chronic illness such as muscular dystrophy, who lose their jobs, and then can’t find insurance. The liberty side says — let’s solve this, but without the overweening federal interference that will bankrupt us. In other words, we caricature one another to our detriment, Best,