Sunday Morning Coming Down
I usually consider it a good thing when the news runs ahead of the artificial news cycle, and this weekend was certainly a good example of that. From the traditional Friday late afternoon “take out the trash” point, this weekend’s news kept right on going. Unfortunately, I was in no position to go with it. I went to bed Saturday night with the knowledge that the House had passed a health care reform package and that there were probably ongoing developments in the Fort Hood shooting and the Tuesday off-off-year elections, and with the vague intention of waking up for the Sunday shows, and, thanks to a cold I’ve been fighting off and the aftereffects of a relaxing and restorative Saturday night pork ribs and beer feed with the family of my good friend Stem Nasty, woke up at eleven o’clock having missed the Sunday morning quarterbacking completely.
No great loss, probably—the Sunday shows really have more to do with the predilections, pretenses, and contractual obligations of their participants than they do with reality, anyway. Just a heads up that I’m limiting my comments to what any major dude with half a heart and half an hour to read the news blogs would tell you, to wit…
Half a cheer should go up for the House passage of a health care reform—a historical development to be sure—but any further enthusiasm should be tempered both by the reform package’s contents and the unlikelihood that some of that content will survive the reconciliation process with the yet to be passed Senate version. As pleased as I am to see, for example, the insurance anti-trust exemption addressed in the House package, the package as a whole seems to be watered down to the point where courage of conviction on the part of the House Progressive Caucus should have sunk it utterly, and is likely to face further watering in the needlessly titrative process of reconciliation—certain members of the Administration still want the test paper to turn purple, while the Senate leadership wants it a light enough blue to pass cloture.
Regardless of what the House package eventually does for health care reform, its passage certainly squelched some of the remaining jockeying for bragging rights after Tuesday’s elections. While I can’t put it past some member of the Republican Party or its propaganda wing to complain of the gross under representation of Republican Governors-elect in the legislative process, Tuesday’s results in the context of Saturday’s House vote provide little cause for GOP celebration. Both Democratic Representatives elected Tuesday voted in the affirmative—damn lucky thing, too, as the final tally for was only two votes above the needed 218. Defeat of health care reform was one of the few things both the Republican establishment and the yahoo upstarts who squared off against them in the New York 23rd agreed upon, and the combined efforts of both, with the support of the usual suspects in media and Michelle Bachman’s tea party house callers, didn’t rise to the point of relevance. Whether the party itself can in its current state of schism is anyone’s guess.
The weekend also saw near-constant updates of the Fort Hood shootings story, many of which were simply corrections of misinformation delivered early in a joint military/media snafu. More misinformation can be expected. The shooter was a practicing Muslim as well as a psychiatrist involved in the treatment of post-traumatic stress of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, and was about to be posted to a war zone himself, meaning any number of hobby horses, from anti-Islamic to anti-war and several stripes in between, can be ridden off this one incident.
Anyone opportunistic enough to try to score political points off the random acts of an irrational man (paging Senator Lieberman) is welcome to try, and probably couldn’t be prevented from it anyway. We should resolve one thing about this situation here and now, however—that anyone advocating extreme action on behalf of the “Fort Hood victims” the way they did on behalf of “the victims of 9/11” be treated with a deaf ear and the contempt they so richly deserve. The aftermath of this situation could become as dangerous as the shootings themselves. If we can keep the kitsch to a minimum on this one, we might just get through it without additional damage.
