Posted Tuesday, June 13, 2017.
I'd like to thank the good folks at FiveThirtyEight for giving me this chance to repeat myself.
THERE ARE NO MODERATE REPUBLICANS IN THE SENATE!
There are, like I said, a few fairly decent-minded men and women who have principles rather than an ideology and who in a better time would have voted occasionally for progressive legislation and who in this awful time occasionally resist the extreme rightward pull of their party's center of gravity. But they resist only so much and for so long. The vast majority of their Republican colleagues are Right Wing extremists who hate us and want us to die. In the end, all the "moderates" are almost always unable to stand up to the majority and let themselves be scared, bullied, coerced, blackmailed, or bribed into giving in and giving up.
Word was these people were going to save us from the AHCA.
It's still the hope.
A forlorn hope. And the hope is now really that they'll save us from the worst of what the House Republicans have wrought.
But hope is hope, and it's worth the effort to keep the hope alive. So call your senators even if you're sure of how they'll vote. At least when it's over the Republicans won't be able to claim they've done what the American people wanted. They'll claim it anyway but at least there'll be more evidence to add to the record of resistance.
Now, to get gloomy.
Gloomier.
I never believed what the word was or held out much hope that the so-called moderates were going to save us. (To be accurate, it’s the headline writer at FiveThirtyEight who called them moderates. In his article, Perry Bacon calls them, in comparison to the Right Wing majority, more moderate. Probably, they should properly be called conservatives, but that word has become the umbrella term for the various cohorts of the Radical Right---the corporatists, the populist reactionaries sometimes still known as the Tea Party types, and the Christian fundamentalists---and “moderate” has become the generally accepted term for Republicans even marginally to the left of that group.) The Senate was always going to pass a repeal of Obamacare in some form. Mitch McConnell was going to see to it any way he could. He was going to see to it if only to spite Barack Obama. He hates Obama that much. There's probably more than a little racism in it, but I think it's more the hatred of a vain and arrogant man for a rival who keeps beating him without doing him the courtesy of hating him back or even acknowledging him as a rival. But personal animosity aside, McConnell is a mean, cruel, and heartless man who sees it as his duty to make life as hard for as many people as he possibly can. He takes delight in the suffering he causes and most of the Republicans in his caucus are his kindred spirits and evil-minded minions.
The whole idea that the government should help people, especially the poor and the weak and the downtrodden and unfortunate sends them into fits of spitting rage or mirthless laughter.
Government exists to keep those people in their powerless place.
I’m not counting on the so-called moderates to stand up to the the extremists’ rage or their laughter.
Never mind that time and time again they've proven themselves cowards and cravens.
They're Republicans.
And the idea that everybody has a right to have health care is one of the most fundamentally un-Republican ideas going.
Even if you go back to the glory days of Fighting Bob La Follette, you'll find that even the most Progressive Republicans, including TR himself, have believed that the primary purpose of government is to protect property and wealth. Which means it's there to protect the status, privilege, and prerogatives of the wealthy and propertied against anyone making claims on their money and objecting to their free and unregulated exercise of their prerogatives, the first and most sacred of which is to make more money and acquire more property, as much as they want any way they want. That's all of us, folks. The not rich. The 99 percent.
And they still believe that making and having money is a sign of God or nature's favor, evidence of and the reward for your hard work, good character, and superior virtue.
Not having money is evidence of and just desserts for your laziness, bad character, and lack of virtue.
They don't all believe that the purpose of life is to make money, but at the backs of their minds when they look at people who haven't made a lot of it is the thought, Why haven't you? What did you do wrong? What's wrong with you?
Unless you can prove otherwise, poverty and debt are signs of moral turpitude. You don't have money because you haven't worked hard enough for it. You're in debt because you were irresponsible, living frivolously beyond your means, failing to restrain the impulse for immediate gratification.
The fable of the grasshopper and the ants is more of a sacred text to them than the parable of the sheep and the goats.
You get what you pay for...and if you can't pay for it, you don't get it. That includes good schools, a warm and safe place to sleep, a comfortable retirement, three square meals a day, decent health care, a family---if you can't afford the costs of raising children, you shouldn't have them. That's what's behind the objection to insurance covering maternity care. Poor people should not have kids.---and, when you get right down to it, any sort of life apart from working day and night, day in and day out, until you drop, and then, having no more purpose or use, you might as well die.
Say certain things to any Republican and, tactfully or bluntly, euphemistically or directly, with a hypocritical attempt to sound regretful or with honest contempt for both the poor, sick, and unfortunate and you for being fool enough to ask and weakling enough to care for those people yourself, you'll get these answers:
The ACHA puts the poor and the sick at the mercy of greedy and heartless insurance companies.
Better than nothing, and probably more than they deserve.
It takes insurance away from millions.
They have other options. Charity. GoFundMe. Finding a job.
They have jobs.
A second job. Or a third.
People will die.
Serves them right.
Anyway, I don’t know that and how is that my lookout if it’s true?
You're doing this to fund tax cuts for the rich.
Of course. They're the makers. This will help them make more and some of that is going to fall out of their pockets which the poor can scramble in the gutters for. The fiercest and most determined scramblers will scramble their way out of poverty and they and the country will be the better for it.
And the others?
What others?
The ones who aren't fierce?
Oh, them. They’ll just have to learn to be fierce, won’t they? And it will do them good. They’ll be better people for it.
And there’s the other problem. As Republicans, the “moderates” are great believers in the gospel of enforced virtue.
You can’t convince them they are doing people a wrong with their indifference and cruelty when they’re certain that they’re doing good by being cruel and indifferent.
They are saving people from a culture of dependence. They are encouraging people to be self-reliant.
Take away a family’s food stamps so that kids have to go to school without breakfast, end school lunch programs so that they have to sit through the day hungry, make them watch their parents eat noodles for dinner so they can have a meager meal of the cheapest meat, canned vegetables, and extra helpings of potatoes or bread to fill up on; take away the family’s health insurance, refuse to raise the minimum wage and even vote to lower it or eliminate it entirely, forcing parents to work two or three jobs to pay the rent and keep the lights and heat on and take the kids to the walk-in clinic when they’re sick (hoping it’s nothing worse than a cold or stomach bug), with maybe a little money left over to go the movies or out for ice cream once in a while, and you’re teaching kids valuable lessons about self-sacrifice and doing without and planning ahead and saving for rainy days and how imperative it is to work hard so that their kids don’t grow up poor and deprived like they did. And having taught them those lessons, you can virtuous yourself and absolve yourself from any guilt you might feel from having let children go hungry and worse.
We're doing this for your own good.
You'll thank us for this later.
Told you I was going to get gloomy.
But that’s why I don’t have much hope the “moderates” will save us.
But not having much hope is not the same as having no hope.
It’ll only take three.
So make the calls.
Even if you’re sure.
Even if your senators are Ted Cruz and John Cornyn or Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch. They shouldn’t be able to say that they’re phones haven’t rung. You should call even if your senators are Democrats, like mine. I’ve already called Chuck Schumer and Kirstin Gillibrand’s offices. I wanted them to know their constituents are behind them. I want them to be able to say to the Republicans, “Oh yeah? Well, our phones are ringing off the hook!”
And you should definitely call if your senators include any of the “moderates”.
Who knows?
Like I said, they’re fairly decent-minded and generally principled rather than ideological. Maybe this time they’ll stand up to the extremists.
Maybe.
We live in hope.
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