Jim Tumbls.

langer:

goosebumpmusic:

It’s more change than you could’ve expected from McCain or Hillary, my friend. Count your blessings.

Sorry, not buying it.

I’m tired of these specious and puerile cliches, this talk of how “things could be worse” or “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. If we truly believe that only the perfect can be perfect then we delude ourselves into letting just about anything else pass as good.

But don’t get me wrong—a lot of people out there agree with you: Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic says the public option had to go if we were going to get even just the subsidies and exchanges, forgetting that this bill still has to go through conference and get gutted even further; Ezra Klein does some impressively fuzzy math to make the highly dubious claim that if 45,000 people die each year due to a lack of coverage we’ll be saving hundreds of thousands of lives over the next decade by making healthcare a little bit more affordable for those who already have it; and Nate Silver says people like me are just “batshit crazy”.

Though Silver’s at least got a point: I am crazy. I’ve gone absolutely, incurably, batshit fucking crazy over the fact that the Democratic party took control last November in one of the greatest landslides in electoral history and has yet completely and utterly failed to capitalize on this mandate. History doesn’t afford many moments like this, when people not only demand change but provide all the means to do so that are in their power to provide.

And this is what we got: a mediocre healthcare bill, a surge in Afghanistan, an economy beholden to the banking sector, and a bunch detainees still sitting in Guantanamo Bay. This is what passes for “change”.

But like I said yesterday: should’ve known better. It’s been the case for many years now that watching the Democratic party try to enact an agenda has been like watching Charlie Brown try to kick a football. Just because we came so much closer to the goal last November doesn’t mean we’re actually going to get it through the uprights—at least not when we’re still letting Lucy take the snap.

Another reblog. Well said, Langer.