As the GOP crumbles, Dems wilt. Nice timing.

[BurtWorm]

:wtf:

Michael Steele is hosting a little bitty tea party at the RNC where's he'll be handing out little bitty tea bags that say "Listen to me!" on them. And he'll apologize to the little bitty angry little tea partiers and beg them not to abandon the GOP in 2010 and 2012. (Really!) And Sarah Palin, meanwhile, is in the vanguard of nominally GOP wing-psychos who have woken up and smelled the tea pot and are ready, willing and able to pander to whatever little bitty whims the tea partiers have.

And how do the Democrats in leadership spots react to this nauseatingly delicious scenario across the aisle? They forget to be Democrats. They kowtow to Joe Lieberman, blue dogs, and health care reform haters. They stiffen their spines as much as they dare and resolve to ... tweak ... and twiddle ... rather than reform.

And they expect us to be there for them in 2010. That is, if they actually care. They should be careful, because they're in serious danger of washing the care out of the rest of us. Apathetic and depressed voters don't always vote.

[T Wolf]

1. Angry voters don't always vote, either. You sometimes really do have to wonder if they prefer to

be in in the numeric minority so that they have no pressure to do anything except yap.

I really have not seen too much that the current Congress and Administration have "accomplished" that improves things (from my perspective).

But there are plenty of "ponies" that they have ridden to death, around and around the paddock, never getting inside.

[BurtWorm]

2. I've just been reading John Aravosis's angry, right-on essay on Bush's 55 member majority

It's enough to make you weep:

http://www.americablog.com/2009/12/gop-had-at-most-55-senators-during.html

It's not about the votes, people. It's about leadership. The current occupant of the White House doesn't like to fight, and the leadership in Congress has never been as good at their jobs, at marshaling their own party, as the Republicans were when they were in the majority. The President is supposed to rally the country, effectively putting pressure on opposition members of Congress to sit down and shut up. And the congressional leadership is supposed to rally its members to hold the line, and get the 51 votes necessary for passing legislation in a climate where the minority is too afraid to use the filibuster. When you have a President who is constitutionally, or intellectually, unable to stand for anything, and a congressional leadership that, rather than disciplining its own members and forging ahead with its own agenda, cedes legislative authority to a president who refuses to lead, you have a recipe for exactly what happened last night. Weakness, chaos, and failure.

We lost real health care reform not because we don't have a "real" filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. We lost health care reform because we don't have a real leader anywhere in our party. It's not going to get better if we elect more Democrats to the Senate and it's not going to play out any differently should we try to revisit this issue in the future.

And one final point. What do you think is going to happen if, during the House-Senate conference, a combined bill is returned to the Senate that even vaguely improves upon the garbage they're currently debating? Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and Evan Bayh will threaten the same filibuster. We're not getting anything better than the crap they just came up with last night. It's over. The next three years are going to be about mediocrity, broken promises, and striving for second best. That's not the America I grew up in. And it's not what I voted for, or was promised.

[BurtWorm]

3. Previously Aravosis said: 'This isn't what we were promised.'

http://www.americablog.com/2009/12/this-isnt-what-we-were-promised.html

It's an effective tactic to play on liberal guilt, arguing "don't you want to save all those poor people who are going to die?" But the fact remains that we the people handed this President and this Congress control of the White House, the US House of Representatives, and filibuster-proof control of the US Senate. We handed them a GOP that was in tatters, and a populace that desperately wanted change. And they blew it. They gave us weakness and cowardice and fear in return. The President went back on his promises from almost day one, and then stayed out of the entire debate until - well - he's still not really involved in the debate, other than to occasionally have his staff secretly try undercut his own campaign promises.

It's not a success when you could have had an A, and instead get a D+, strive for a D+, and then have the nerve to say "look mom!" It's really getting tiresome hearing Democrats suggest that because their bill does more than George Bush would have done, but otherwise they've gutted their most important campaign promises, we should suck it up and be happy. I voted for change, not pennies.

You had the best chance in decades to make a difference in all of our lives, and you chose to blow it. You don't deserve our praise. Or our votes.