Bitch, Please

28Feb2010

The Democratic majority is running on fumes.

Thursday's televised health care dog and pony show failed to produce the hoped for backlash of public sentiment against Republicans blocking of the President's health care agenda.

Following the summit House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it clear that they plan to push forward:

"Lawmakers sometimes must enact policies that, even if unpopular at the moment, will help the public..." Her meaning was clear:

Democratic lawmakers are to fall on their sword for their President.

Reconciliation is the only way forward, and Pelosi reiterated today in an interview released by ABC news.

"We're not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress," she said. "We're here to do the job for the American people."

She dismisses the notion that the American people are against her, once again attacking Tea Party voters as the "AstroTurf" movement, that's been hijacked by the GOP and Health Insurer lobby.

Really, Nancy? Are we back to that?

While I admit that I have feared that the Tea Party movement would be co-opted by Republicans, I don't believe that's happened yet. If anything, the reverse is becoming true. Republican candidates at all levels have had their "come to Jesus" moments with the Tea Parties, and are being made to listen to what America wants.

Of course the idea that Tea Parties are somehow being funded or organized from the outside is ludicrous. I wonder if those on the left have taken time to actually, I don't know, attend a protest event? The disorganized gatherings of concerned people taking time off of work, and expending their hard earned money to be there, don't exactly smack of hard core activists.

The left, on the other hand, has made a profession of activism. A cursory and unscientific survey of the top five job site on Google, for the title "Activist", yielded 42 open positions for activists with left wing organizations. The Ladders, a job search website that specializes in jobs paying $100K+ per year, had 8 openings. Pulling down 100 large a year doesn't sound very "grassroots" to me.

I even came across an advertisement on Craigslist for a company that organizes so called grassroots campaigns for you. Notice the front page quote from Barack Obama, and the prominently displayed "jobs" link. Their client list reads like a who's who of left wing political organizations in America:

Grassroots Campaigns past and current clients include: Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Equality California, the Democratic National Committee, MoveOn.org Political Action, the Center for American Progress...

It goes on.

The truth is that the American people are genuinely against this bill, and that no one who has had as much plastic surgery as Nancy Pelosi, has any business talking about what's real and what's fake.