The Great Spelunker

Barack Obama will go down in history as The Great Spelunker. No other president has done more caving.

I don't usually run a "what he said" blog, but when one comes across something like this, what more can one say than...what he said.

Boehner has stated publicly that he wants to get spending cuts passed with Republican votes alone. When he was asked by reporters if he would try and put together a coalition with Democrats to pass legislation to keep the government from shutting down, Boehner said, "not very interested".

The BBC also reported that Boehner had said that "Republicans would not be forced into accepting options they did not want to endorse".

Contrast that with the capitulating and spine caving sell out by Barrack Obama to the small Republican minority on the country's most important legislation even though Obama had the biggest congressional majority of any president in 60 years. Contrast that with Obama's scrounging for one Republican vote on the public option when the Democrats didn't need Republican votes at all, and then, not getting it, throwing the policy under the bus along with hundreds of millions of Americans who wanted real healthcare reform. Contrast Boehner refusal to compromise on principles with Obama caving in to Republicans on extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 5% of Americans, something Obama publicly stated since 2007 he would never do.

Obamacare was rotten policy -- a sell-out to the insurance industry. It had one major benefit: Getting rid of "pre-existing condition" requirements. One may easily scoff at the inadequacies of that achievement -- unless one has a pre-existing condition.

The right kept portraying Obamacare as socialism, even though it was anything but. It mandated purchases from private insurers, who have no reason to exist.

Now the Republicans will be able to claim that they stopped "socialism" in its tracks, just in the nick of time. Had the program gone into effect, the public might have learned, belatedly, that it was not socialistic at all.

And so myth becomes history.

The health care debate had one virtue: It forced the Republicans to admit that libertarian theology is a sham. They came right out and admitted that private industry could not offer the citizenry a better deal than the (soon-discarded) public option. Why would they say such a thing? Why did they fear competition from the gummint, if the gummint always does everything wrong? Didn't Milton Friedman tell us that private industry is always more efficient?

Gosh -- could it be that the Friedmanites lied?

You think maybe that's why your credit card bills are sent to you via the post office, and not via Federal Express?

It's never too late to show some backbone, but if the Democrats couldn't show it with the biggest congressional majority in 60 years there is not a lot of hope they will show it now. They need new leadership and need a new collection of paid strategists and communicators who know how to frame an argument and a message and have at least some powers of persuasion. The Democrats have always had policy and ideas on their side. Just not enough backbone in leadership and probably the worst collection of political strategists and communicators in history.

As for Obama, he is missing the part of the male anatomy that James Carville pointed to, and had no real convictions, principles or integrity to begin with so there is nothing about Obama that is going to change. He is purely a politician and a gutless one at that with a 13 year political history of standing for nothing and fighting for nothing. Which is why Cornell West, the African American historian at Princeton recently said of Obama, "if you stand for nothing you fall for anything".

If an editor gave those last two paragraphs a mild scrubbing for grammar and punctuation, those words could stand for the next hundred years as an excellent summary of everything that has gone wrong since January, 2009.

What does it say about Obama that nobody -- nobody at all, across the political spectrum -- thinks that he'll stand up to the Republicans?

This presidency is like a revision of Blazing Saddles -- except in this version, Lili von Shtupp doesn't shout "It's twue! It's twue!" Instead, she cries: "Mein gott, vat happen to your Hoden? I neffer see anyzink zo teensy!"