I'm so ashamed

I learned something BIG this morning, and I learned it in the shockingly tardy 21st paragraph of the NY Times' 25-paragraph story, "Wearing Brave Face, Obama Braces for Health Care Ruling." Had I been Jodi Kantor's editor, I would have made it the lede, because, well, like I said, this is BIG, as in Joe Biden Big--yes it's that fucking big, or at least damn close to it. To wit,

If the court strikes down the mandate and Mr. Obama wins in November, he could face one last version of his perpetual choice on health care: would he settle, learning to live with a sharply edited law? (Given that Republicans see the bill as a signature piece of big-government overreach, he might have no choice.)

I'm immensely thankful to Ms. Kantor for opening my delusional eyes. You see, it's been my impression, nay, my conviction, that Republicans plunged into palsied hysterics over President Obama's GOP-Hertitage Foundation-Mitt Romney Affordable Care Act because Republicans are obstructionist hooligans who wish Obama every possible political harm. I thought Republicans plunged into palsied hysterics because they're a treacherous pack hypocritical jackals. And I thought Republicans plunged into palsied hysterics because, simply, hysterics is what they do.

But now I learn that I'm wrong, dreadfully wrong, and that I've been wrong wrong wrong for some time. Because Republicans, according to Jodi Kantor and the inestimable New York Times, plunged into palsied hysterics only because they see the bill as a signature piece of big-government overreach.

I just looked out the window. Yes, the sky is blue. I opened the window. I heard the birds chirping. And yes, yes, children are playing delightedly and the breeze is cool and refreshing and I see that all around me it's morning again in America--strike that, it has been morning in America all along, but I was too blind to see it, too deaf to hear it, too contemptuous of what I foolishly thought were villainously depraved and slitheringly decadent Republicans to appreciate it. And here they were, those honorable chaps, just sitting in genuine, good-faith, philosophical disagreement.

I'm so ashamed of myself. So terribly ashamed.

Comments

[Janicket]

The Villagers, the media, must maintain at all times that there are two viable political parties, two equally valid competing ideologies (well, the Right is always righter, but we'll give the hippies a break now and then), two legitimate approaches to governance, two sides to every story.

No matter the degradation of public debate, no matter how much at least some of them ken how wrong that is; no, the facade must be maintained at all costs, for the alternative is too dreadful to contemplate: An honest, fact-digging, take-no-bullshit examination of what reality actually, really is; followed by immense white-hot rightwing blowback that will take their comfy well-paid jobs away from them.

And besides, the Villagers and the infotainment talking heads say, it's all just a game, right? Both sides do it, they're all just the same, it's the horse race and the scandal and the soundbites -- they're all that matters.