"There are a number of people who will never forgive [Barack Obama] for being half-black" (the late Stanley Hoffmann)

Plus some thoughts on Zbig Brzezinski, Henry the K,
the brothers Kennedy, and some fellow Frenchies


Harvard Prof. Stanley Hoffmann speaking on European-American relations at the Salzburg Global Seminar in 1984

by Ken

The New York Review of Books is remembering a frequent contributor, the late Stanley Hoffmann, longtime professor of international relations at Harvard. who died on September 13, with online publication of a "conversation" drawn from a never-published December 2011 interview with Michal Matlak ("a PhD student in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and a regular contributor to the Polish magazine Liberal Culture").

I've plucked out a few excerpts from those excerpts.


A COUPLE OF HARVARD DEPARTMENTAL COLLEAGUES:
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI AND HENRY KISSINGER

About Brzezinski, and the radical change he underwent, Hoffmann recalled:

He was always fascinated by and worried about the Soviet Union and nothing else. I liked him very much. But then he was a great supporter of the Vietnam War which I thought was a disaster and unwinnable. Now he has completely changed. I don’t think he remembers that he was such a supporter of the war. I was quite surprised at a conference which took place in Berlin about ten years ago to hear Zbig explaining that what the US did in Vietnam was a form of colonialism. He would never have said that earlier. In other words he was wise enough to change his mind. We are exactly the same age.

Zbig is a complicated guy. There was this permanent battle that went on between Zbig, representing the hard line on Russia, and Cyrus Vance, who wanted more accommodation, more flexibility. And the relations between the two of them were just awful. The story of my department was, for years, the battle between Zbigniew and Henry Kissinger. The difference has been that Kissinger never took Zbigniew seriously, and Zbigniew could not tolerate Henry, because Henry was there always before Zbig in occupying the high positions.

As for Henry the K, Hoffmann said: "I could write a book on Henry, which I will not. Everything is very complicated with Mr. Kissinger."

He did comment on something Kissinger "was very good at":

There was very recently, in The New York Times, a long front-page review by him of a new and very long biography of George Kennan. And what I found remarkable about Henry’s article was that it said nothing. I went through all of it and you don’t know at the end what he really thought. And he was very good at that.

ABOUT THE BROTHERS KENNEDY

After some conversation about "politicians who are able to combine moral ends with Realpolitik, Hoffmann was asked about another possible "successful idealist."

You knew John F. Kennedy. Did he belong to the same group of successful idealists?

Although I knew Kennedy a little, I did not like him, for purely personal reasons. He was very much an opportunist, very intelligent. I knew all three of the Kennedys. The youngest one, Teddy, who died about three years ago, was my student. He was not a genius, but he was a good person. He spent much of his time as a member of the Senate helping people get visas to the United States. He saved people. And he never really thought much about himself, because he didn’t think he was quite smart enough to reach the heights. But I liked him. The other two, Bobby and John Kennedy, struck me as hard-nosed, calculating machines.

So you don’t see in their politics a strong connection to human rights?

I think that the one who developed [this connection]—just before he was murdered—was Bobby Kennedy. He started as an aide of [Republican Senator Joe] McCarthy, so he travelled a great deal, so to speak. John F. Kennedy, I couldn’t quite figure him out. In any case his assassination was a disaster, because his successor, LBJ, did some very good things in some areas relating to human rights, but foreign policy was not his domain. But who are we to pass judgment on everybody?

"FOR THE TIME BEING AMERICA IS UNGOVERNABLE"

About President Obama, Hoffmann expressed admiration for his two books, saying, "He writes well and he is a very good speaker."

[Y]ou have lots of people, including Newt Gingrich and some others, who still wonder whether Obama is really an American. It requires a certain amount of chutzpah for somebody like Obama to be president because he knows there are a number of people who will never forgive him for being half-black. And for the time being America is ungovernable. The Constitution—and all the additions that have been grafted on it—make effective government almost impossible. For almost every important measure you need a 60 percent majority in the Senate. It is almost impossible to get this. So nothing works.

AS YOU CAN NO DOUBT GUESS FROM THE NAME --

Stanley Hoffmann was by birth French. (He had vivid memories of the Nazi occupation of his homeland.) And he had interesting things to say about Europe generally, and in particular about several of his countrymen, including --

• Mitterrand, about whom he wrote a book, and whom he described as "not an admirable politician," "highly intelligent, but also a narcissist."

• De Gaulle, of whom he said, "I have learned more about politics by studying de Gaulle than by studying Mitterand." He admired De Gaulle's being "very flexible when it came to the personalities with whom he worked." "[A]fter the liberation, some of the people who were most useful to France were not politicians or ex-politicians; they were business people, technicians, civil servants, who were totally indifferent to the battles between socialists and Christian democrats."

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Death is too serious a subject to be demeaned by demagoguing crackpots and crooks who have only contempt for reality

Why aren't we praising the VA for distributing this guide to the fraught world of end-of-life decisions? Why has the All-Lies All-the-Time Right jumped on it? Because they're lying, hate-spewing, terror-mongering crackpots and crooks with no sense of decency or shame. Why is Arlen Specter promising hearings on the so-called "Death Book"? Because he's a cynical, demagoguing son of a bitch who will apparently stop at nothing to promote his own political interests.

"If there is no reasonable expectation of my recovery from physical or mental disability, I wish to be allowed to die and not be kept alive by artificial means or heroic measures, but wish only that drugs be mercifully administered to me for terminal suffering, even if they hasten the moment of my death."

-- from my mother's living will

by Ken

The death of Sen. Ted Kennedy has at least injected a note of reality regarding a subject that we humans as a race have always dealt with badly, most often through simple denial. What I wish to suggest just now is that death is too serious a subject to be sullied by wackos and clowns and crooks. In other words, it really ought to be off limits to Today's Republicans and Movement Conservatives.

I mentioned recently that my 90-year-old mother is dying, though she has shown herself to be in no rush to make the final departure. (She has been in hospice care since January of 2008.) I also mentioned that she made this whole horrible but unfortunately natural and inevitable process immeasurably easier for everyone involved -- herself, me, her health care providers -- by having a living will.

Some of you may never have seen one. It's a simple enough document.

TO MY FAMILY, MY PHYSICIAN, MY CLERGYMAN, MY LAWYER:

If the time comes when I can no longer take part in decisions for my own future, this statement and declaration shall stand as the expression of my wishes. I recognize that death is as much a reality as birth, growth, maturity, and old age -- it is but a phase in the cycle of life and is the only certainty. I do not fear death as much as I fear the indignity of deterioration, dependence, and hopeless pain. If there is no reasonable expectation of my recovery from physical or mental disability, I wish to be allowed to die and not be kept alive by artificial means or heroic measures, but wish only that drugs be mercifully administered to me for terminal suffering, even if they hasten the moment of my death.

I recognize that my wishes place a heavy burden of responsibility upon you, and I therefore make the following declaration with the intention of sharing this responsibility and this decision with you and of mitigating any feelings of guilt that you may have.

What follows is a DECLARATION that translates these beliefs into instructions, and the signatures of her and her witnesses.

I'm assuming that my mother didn't write this, that the language was provided by her lawyer after consultation regarding her wishes. But she made it clear to me in conversation that these are indeed her wishes. I see that she signed this on June 29, 1993, which would have been the week following her 74th birthday. Probably more to the point, it was the year in which my stepfather, her husband of 30 years, died -- mercifully -- of pneumonia after several grueling years of struggle with Alzheimer's.

I suppose she shouldn't have waited as long as she did to effect the living will, but I give her full credit for finally doing it. People of her time weren't brought up to do such things. At the same time, by age 74 she was able to assure me that she had a good life and she understood that when her time came, her time came. And we were lucky in that it would be another 14 1/2 years before her wishes would need to be honored. She even survived a cerebral hemorrhage in 1996, and had six or seven pretty good years after it.

(It should go without saying, but perhaps needs to be said given the caliber of minds now working this beat, that my mother could have made different choices about her end. The point is that they're her choices to make. The modern-day Right has gotten so used to imposing its own insanities on everyone else, more and more often accompanied by threats of violence, and those people are in any case so removed from the whole concept of rational decision-making, that they have no way of understanding what it means to assist people in making their own reasoned choices.)

Because we humans tend to deal so irrationally with the whole subject of death, it has taken a long time for us to develop the wisdom and maturity to deal with the host of complications that attend it. It should have been a source of consolation, even pride, to learn that provision to cover the cost of end-of-life counseling was included in the draft proposals for health care reform, and that the Department of Veterans Affairs was making available to its clients a serious book, or booklet, whatever it is, on the subject.

Instead, a cadre of the vilest, most contemptible, most hating and most hateful people in the history of the human race chose to demagogue the subject with their psychotic rampage of sliming, seeking to gain power over the people they terrified with the lies born of their own ignorance and irrationality.

I understand that the Right, having been trapped in a desperate political squeeze, where the contemptibility and irrationality of its political ideas have been so devastatingly exposed, feels that its only hope is to vilify reality and reason and substitute its framework of greedy fraudulence and psychosis, that only by ensuring that no word of truth ever escapes their foul mouths. Nevertheless, there ought to be -- as I suggested at the outset -- certain subjects that they have some residual shame to profane. It was vile when Sen. Bill Frist and like-minded poltiical whores chose to launch a crusade of lying obfuscation over the dying Terry Schiavo. If there are words to express the contempt that should have been heaped on them. It is, if anything, worse for the Sarah Palins of the world to cause such torment to people who weren't previously infected with her well-earned sense of utter worthlessness.

As Senator Kennedy's funeral approaches, with the likelihood that the Scumbag Right will attempt to politicize the grief of his mourners as they did after the funeral of the late Minnesota Paul Wellstone, I'm grateful to a colleague for calling attention to this wonderful Pandagon post by Amanda Marcotte:

Please politicize my death

I’m almost 32 and I’m in good health, so this might seem a little premature. But as the President pointed out that even young, healthy people should have living wills, the occasion of Ted Kennedy’s death --and Paul Wellstone’s before it -- makes it clear that anyone who is a liberal in the public eye at all should explicitly spell out their wishes about the “politicization” of their deaths, or else the wingnuts will declare that the only proper way to honor your legacy is to start by undermining it. So, in the event of my passing, I want it to be clear these are my wishes:

1) Please honor me by continuing to fight for the liberal causes I held dear.

2) Explicitly state in any obituaries, memorial services, etc. that what I would have wanted was to keep the fight going.

3) Impassioned speeches about the fight ahead for progressivism are especially welcome .
4) Indeed, the only way to honor my memory is to double down and fight for a better world .
5) Conservatives who don’t like this should shut the fuck up.

Obviously, I’m a mere blogger, so this is mostly irrelevant. But I’d like to get this out there in hopes of inspiring others. Hopefully, those who are truly influential to the point where wingnuts will try to use their death to undermine their legacy would be well-advised to spell out their wishes, so their survivors have a trump card.

Well said, Amanda! And an inspiration in the face of the sociopathic Rightists who will be dancing on Senator Kennedy's grave, not to mention the subtler wingnut hypocrites, if anything more obnoxious, people like Young Johnny McCranky and Orrin Hatch, who pay lip service to a man whose legacy they revile.

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Will The Republicans Get Away With Destroying Ted Kennedy's Legacy?

With vicious right-wing extremists and their leader, Rush Limbaugh, fulminating that Democrats would try to reform health care as a tribute to Senator Kennedy-- who called that mission "the cause of my life"-- the Massachusetts state legislature seems to be moving towards helping with that goal by granting another, more recent Kennedy wish-- asking lawmakers to allow Gov. Deval Patrick to name a temporary Senate replacement until a special election can be held in 5 months.

Kennedy wanted a caretaker replacement named so that Massachusetts would be represented with two senators between the time he could no longer serve and when a replacement is elected. Predictably, Republicans are opposed to the idea for the same reasons Democrats favor it. The new senator will surely be a supporter of the Edward Kennedy Health Care Reform Bill-- as well as other family friendly legislation Republican habitually oppose. Patrick supports the idea and the most powerful Democrats in the state legislature have come around the agreeing it's the way to go.

Elections Law committee co-chair Sen. Tom Kennedy (D-Brockton) said he and House co-chair Michael J. Moran (D-Boston) may bump up a hearing date for a bill that would give temporary appointing power to Patrick to Sept. 17.

“(The bill) was originally grouped in with the October hearing, but we’re trying to take into consideration the interest of the legislators,” said Kennedy.

Rep. Robert M. Koczera (D-New Bedford), who filed the bill, spoke to Moran yesterday and said he received assurances that his bill would be heard before the original Oct. 7 hearing.

“I’m pretty confident they’ll try to honor the request in some way,” said Koczera.

Several friends have asked me for proof that the vicious right-wing extremists, aside from Limbaugh, are already disparaging Kennedy's name. I hardly know where to start and I don't have any stomach for sifting through the garbage. Politico, fortunately, has no such queasiness:

Andrew Breitbart, a Washington Times columnist who oversees Breitbart.com and BigHollywood.com, tapped into the anti-Kennedy vein in the hours after the senator’s death was announced, posting a series of Twitter messages in which he called Kennedy a “villain,” a “duplicitous bastard” and a “prick.”

"I’m more than willing to go off decorum to ensure THIS MAN is not beatified,” Breitbart wrote. “Sorry, he destroyed lives. And he knew it."

...“They say one should not speak ill of the dead,” wrote Bill Bennett on the National Review’s website. “True. But I am of the view that one should not lie about the dead either. So I will not go on.”

Bennett did go on, however, saying there was “no one in the Senate” with Kennedy’s “force power, and impact”-– even if the Massachusetts Democrat “assaulted our causes and nominees.”

Their causes? Like implementing a barbaric society based on the Law of The Jungle? If conservative "causes" had prevailed we wouldn't have had a Bill of Rights; we would still have slavery; women wouldn't have the right to vote. There would be no public education, no labor unions to protect workers, no protection for consumers, no Social Security, no environmental protections, no protections for the disabled, no Medicare, no regulations of the unbridled power of corporations. These are all what conservative "causes" are and have always been all about-- preserving the status quo on behalf of the wealthy elites who prosper and bribe them-- that simple. And you know what? I'm sure Ted Kennedy would proudly stand up and plead guilty to that charge of Bill Bennett's. I wish I could be as sure Barack Obama would. Maybe Obama plans to really give the public option a Teddy Kennedy-like push when support climbs above the measly 79% mark. That includes 89% of Democrats and 80% of independents. I guess what's holding back President Bipartisan is that only 61% of Republicans favor the public option... and that means the 33% who oppose it won't like him. Maybe they'll say he's a socialist or Hitler or born in another country or that they wish he was dead. Time to grow up and accept the mantle of leadership we gave you.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (1932-2009)

The president spoke about Senator Kennedy this

morning at Blue Heron Farm in Chilmark, MA.

"My heart and soul weeps at the loss of my best friend in the Senate, my beloved friend, Ted Kennedy."

-- West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, in a statement

by Ken

Both Howie and I find ourselves with little to say regarding the only-too-expected news of the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy. Most of the things there are to be said are already being said. Howie gathered a number of links.

Here's Senator Byrd (as reported by Michael O'Brien for The Hill), the only member of the Senate who's been there longer than Senator Kennedy, and himself in seriously poor health, expressing hope for passage of a good health care reform bill that will bear his old friend's name:

"I had hoped and prayed that this day would never come," Byrd said in a statement. "My heart and soul weeps at the loss of my best friend in the Senate, my beloved friend, Ted Kennedy."

Byrd's wistful statement focused on the work accomplished with Kennedy during decades together in the Senate, and called on the healthcare bill before Congress to be renamed in honor of Kennedy.

"In his honor and as a tribute to his commitment to his ideals, let us stop the shouting and name calling and have a civilized debate on health care reform which I hope, when legislation has been signed into law, will bear his name for his commitment to insuring the health of every American," Byrd said.

Here's the great Jack Newfield, who died in 2004, writing in The Nation in 2002 ("The Senate's Fighting Liberal," a sensational piece they've appropriately reposted), recalling the just-turned-30 Kennedy arriving in the Senate in 1962, when "most pundits saw him as a dummy who had cheated on an exam at Harvard to stay eligible for football":

Now, forty years later, Ted Kennedy looks like the best and most effective senator of the past hundred years. He has followed the counsel of his first Senate tutor, Phil Hart of Michigan, who told him you can accomplish anything in Washington if you give others the credit. Kennedy has drafted and shaped more landmark legislation than liberal giants like Robert Wagner, Hubert Humphrey, Estes Kefauver and Herbert Lehmann.

Here's a bit of what the president had to say this morning:

The Kennedy name is synonymous with the Democratic Party. And at times, Ted was the target of partisan campaign attacks. But in the United States Senate, I can think of no one who engendered greater respect or affection from members of both sides of the aisle. His seriousness of purpose was perpetually matched by humility, warmth, and good cheer. He could passionately battle others and do so peerlessly on the Senate floor for the causes that he held dear, and yet still maintain warm friendships across party lines.

And that's one reason he became not only one of the greatest senators of our time, but one of the most accomplished Americans ever to serve our democracy.

On OpenLeft, our friend Mike Lux, stressing that "I take history very seriously" and "I am not given to hyperbole, declares Kennedy "The Greatest Senator in American History."

In this White House photo, President Obama and Senator Kennedy walked on the grounds of the White House before signing of the Kennedy Service Act at the SEED School in Washington, DC, on April 21 of this year.

We come now to my contribution. I'm mad.

Monday night on Countdown Keith Olbermann was talking to MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell Jr. about the possibility that Democrats have figured out that they may have to do the health care battle on their own. At one point, Keith noted: "For sheer egregiousness, the two senators invoking Ted Kennedy‘s name into this, I‘d like your reaction to that." And I got the feeling that O'Donnell, who normally shows so little emotion, was mad too:

Well, this is kind of shocking. Orrin Hatch and John McCain both saying that if Ted Kennedy were here, we would have a deal, they would be able to work out a deal with him. This strikes me as them both just trying to portray themselves as reasonable men who could do business with another reasonable man.

They both voted against—they‘ve already voted on this—they voted against the Kennedy bill in the Kennedy committee, in the health, education, labor, and pensions committee. They‘ve had a bill, they voted against it.

That bill was conceived of by Chairman Kennedy. He wasn‘t there at the time of the votes. Chris Dodd was there getting it through the committee for Chairman Kennedy. The chairman made his wishes known very clearly.

John McCain, a member of the committee, Orrin Hatch a member of the committee could have tried to work with Senator Kennedy at the beginning and they rejected that possibility.

Fifteen years ago, Orrin hatch was also on both the Kennedy committee and the Senate Finance Committee where I was working. He voted against the Kennedy bill that came through the Kennedy committee then. He then personally complained to me about how ugly and partisan the process was, run by Senator Kennedy, in Senator Kennedy‘s committee. And he was hoping that we would do a more bipartisan process in the finance committee, which we did do.

But Orrin Hatch was not part of anything Ted Kennedy tried to do on this, 15 years ago, and nothing that he tried to do this year. Same thing with John McCain. I don‘t know why they said that. They know that they didn‘t at any moment engage in real negotiations with Senator Kennedy this year.

This is just one of many moments lately when you wish Republicans were acquainted with the wise old virtue of keeping your damned mouth shut. It's true that once upon a time Senator Kennedy was often able to work with Republicans. (The Newfield Nation piece is especially rewarding on this count.) But as O'Donnell points out, his Republican "friends" were also perfectly capable of giving him the finger, and in the current Congress the "Just Say No" Republicans were saying no to him as surely as they were to any other Democrat.

Noah dug up this clip of Senator Kennedy on Jan. 25, 2007, dealing with Republican efforts to block a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage. "He starts off calm but gets very passionate," Noah writes. "It's a great little speech from a man who had a rare combo of being very, very wealthy AND caring for working people and their families. No Republican he!"




UPDATE: Howie Explains Why
He Finally Broke Down And Wept

I cried today, not when I woke up at 5 and heard that Senator Kennedy had passed away. Everyone passes away-- and few who have been so recognized for the selflessness with which he has serviced his country. I wept today when I watched the video Noah dug up (above) and heard Senator Kennedy thundering in a speech about a modest cost of living increase for minimum wage workers. "What is the price," he shouted, "that you want from these working men and women? What cost? How much more do we have to give to the private sector and to business? How many billion dollars more are you asking-- are you requiring? When does the greed stop, we ask the other side... what is it about it that drives you Republicans crazy? What is it about working men and women that you find so offensive?"

He shamed them-- almost all of them. In the end all but Tom Coburn (R-OK), Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) voted in favor. But the delaying tactics-- they never stopped and right to the bitter end the slimiest of Republican bribe takers, many of them millionaires by dint of their "service" to the corporations who pay them to betray their own constituents threw whatever they had into the battle against economic security for the very American working families (and our economy) they're supposedly protecting. Burr, Coburn, DeMint, Vitter, Isakson are all up for re-election next year. I wonder how many voters in North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia will be voting to re-elect these monstrosities based on the barrage of lies spewing out of the corporate media on behalf of the elites that oppress them. Do you think our silver-tongued president could ever give a speech so powerful, so moving and so effective like the one Kennedy delivered on the Senate floor?


2ND UPDATE: OUR FRIEND BALAKIREV OFFERS
A SPLENDID MEMORIAL TO SENATOR TED

I'm taking the liberty of pulling this comment out of the comments section. -- Ken

Watch Kurosawa's great film, Ikiru. It's all about a middle ranking bureaucrat who discovers he has inoperable cancer, and decides to push through a project that's been banging around the office for a long time: getting a small children's playground built. He faces all the shit you'd expect in various ways along the way, but it goes through, and there's this one brilliant scene towards the end where we see him, in the rain, at night, swinging on a screen, and laughing to the sky.

I thought of that will to do good in that precise film when Kennedy's death was announced. He was always thinking of new ways to benefit the US. It was never about pride or greed. It was always about finding a myriad of ways to push things to do good--and if most of them died in the Senate, what got through must have made him feel like that bureaucrat who finally accomplished something for everybody.

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A Little Chat With A Congresswoman About Afghanistan Leads To The Real Problems Confronting Health Care Reform

Last night I went to a gathering of people interested in hearing from a member of Congress who had just returned from Afghanistan. After a frank talk-- that confirmed my feelings that our presence there is as completely hopeless as it was when Cheney was running the show-- she opened the floor to questions. One woman-- with whom I had co-hosted a fundraiser for state Senator Barack Obama many years ago when he was first running in a seemingly hopeless Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate-- prefaced her question like this: "Since you're the smartest member of Congress..."

Donna Edwards (D-MD) demurred. "I don't know what Barney Frank or Jerrold Nadler would think about that." And there are a number of other exceptionally bright and thoughtful members of Congress as well, probably more than a dozen. But no one who knows her would deny Donna Edwards fits right in with that crew. Many of them were on a short list that caused Rahm Emanuel's short fuse to blow 2 weeks ago-- the 4 dozen Democrats who refused to vote for the supplemental budget that would continue unmerited war funding in Afghanistan. Although Nadler fumed and decided to give Obama the benefit of the doubt at the last minute, most of the other best and brightest Dems in the House courageously voted "no"-- from Alan Grayson (D-FL), Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Jared Polis (D-CO), Keith Ellison (D-MN), and Maxine Waters (D-CA) to Barney Frank (D-MA), Jim McDermott (D-WA), Steve Cohen (D-TN) and, of course, Donna Edwards.

But it wasn't her insights about the pathetic non-policy in Afghanistan that I walked away thinking about. It was something she said about the bitter battle over health care reform. One of the House's most outspoken and well-reasoned advocates of universal health care-- sidetracked by the puppets of the Medical Industrial Complex to a chance for a "public option"-- Donna is worried that Big Insurance will embrace the "public option." Embrace and then smother to death in a bear hug. They don't want the competition, so they have given their well-paid allies-- Republicans, Blue Dogs, members of the Evan Bayh anti-Obama Bloc of Senate Conservadems-- their orders: let it pass and then make it dysfunctional. They will gamble everything that their three highest paid shills-- Arlen Specter (R/D-PA- $4,026,933), Max Baucus (D-MT- $2,833,731) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY- $2,758,468)-- will be able to sabotage the public option sufficiently enough to ensure that it is not robust and not competitive.

Although Ted Kennedy is the Chair of the committee that deals with health issues, the Medical Industrial Complex hasn't been forthcoming with the "donations" to him the way they are with the career criminals who always support them, what I call the "over two million dollar men-- like John Cornyn (R-TX), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Richard Burr (R-NC), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT), These 4 have also been tasked with guaranteeing that a public option will be non-functional. Unfortunately, no one can reasonably expect anything more from Republicans. They are the party that seems to live to torture-- including American working families.

We do, on the other hand, expect more from Democrats. Sometimes I wonder why. Truth be told, though, for every corporate whore like Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson and Tom Carper, the Democrats have stalwart defenders of working families-- Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Dick Durbin, Sherrod Brown and, of course, the Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy. And today, despite the mealy-mouthed manipulations of turds like Baucus and Nelson, the Lion was roaring again.

Senator Edward Kennedy, chairman of one of two Senate panels drafting health-care overhaul plans, said he will include a government-run program to compete with private insurers in a measure to be considered in mid-June, asserting his role in the emerging debate despite his battle with brain cancer.

..."An important foundation of our legislation is the following principle: If you like the coverage you have now, you keep it," Kennedy wrote in an op-ed article in the Boston Globe. "But if you don’t have health insurance or don’t like the insurance you have, our bill will give you new, more affordable options."

This is the insurance companies worst nightmare, and the hope for millions of American families. And stopping this is why the Medical-Industrial Complex has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in legalized bribes to corrupt members of Congress-- basically the entire Republican Senate caucus plus Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln and a few other untrustworthy bribe-hungry Democrats. And what about the White House?

Playing on the corporate side you'll always have Rahm Emanuel, the darkest force inside the Administration who went from being the Democrats' Tom DeLay in Congress to being their Karl Rove in the White House. But his isn't the only voice-- only the loudest, most insistent and most malevolent. On the other side of the issue, also vying for the president's ear is OMB Director Peter Orszag. Orszag is committed to real health care reform, exactly what the Baucuses and Nelsons are joining the GOP to prevent. And he's doubly dangerous to their cause because he makes his case in terms of fiscal discipline:

When I give public talks on health care reform, the question I receive most often is "given the government’s fiscal situation, how can it make sense for the government to take on new spending commitments as part of health reform?"  The answer is two-fold.  First, health care reform has two components: cost containment provisions and expanded coverage.  In the near term, the impact of expanded coverage will temporarily dominate, and health care reform will therefore temporarily increase government spending.   Over time, however, the impact of the cost containment provisions will accumulate, and the net impact will be a reduction-– and perhaps a dramatic one-– in government spending.  Second, while we are waiting for the cost containment provisions to take hold, we are insisting that health care reform be deficit neutral.  In other words, the Administration is committed to a health care reform that is at least deficit neutral over 10-years -- and deficit-reducing, potentially to quite a significant degree, over the longer term.

It's important to bolster the worthwhile voices inside the Administration despite the cloying relentlessness of the self-serving legendary Emanuel hype-machine.

MoveOn.org is running radio ads in Maine, North Dakota, Oregon, Delaware, Washington and Florida aimed at senators on Baucus' committee who are still on the fence about the public option. All of the ads but one target Democrats.

MoveOn.org has also organized “thousands” of members, including doctors, nurses and small-business owners, to visit senators’ district offices to call on them to support the so-called public plan option.

“President Obama and 70 percent of voters support healthcare reform that includes a public health insurance option to contain costs, increase competition and guarantee coverage,” the narrator in the ad states.

“The insurance industry says with new rules they can do it alone, but they’ll find a way to put profits first. We need a health insurance choice not run by the insurance companies to keep costs down and ensure access to quality, affordable care.”

The question over whether to make the public plan option available in all parts of the country has emerged as one of the thorniest of the healthcare debate. Republicans say a nationwide public plan option would be a “non-starter” and would represent a march toward a single-payer, socialized healthcare insurance system. They argue that government competition would drive private healthcare companies out of business.

It's important to remember that the real battle for real health care reform has nothing to do with the GOP. It will take place entirely inside the Democratic Party. Frank Luntz explained the strategy to his GOP clients a few weeks ago: "You're not going to get what you want, but you can kill what they're trying to do." They can-- but only if they can peel off enough corporate Democrats to water down Obama's plans. The Republican smear machine is full operating now and their front groups are operating as though they were in the middle of an election campaign. They're wallowing in the mud and sowing discord and confusion. MoveOn has succinctly distilled the thrust of the Obama plan down to 5 key point:

1. Choice, choice, choice. If the public health insurance option passes, Americans will be able to choose between their current insurance and a high-quality, government-run plan similar to Medicare. If you like your current care, you can keep it. If you don't-- or don't have any-- you can get the public insurance plan.

2. It will be high-quality coverage with a choice of doctors. Government-run plans have a track record of innovating to improve quality, because they're not just focused on short-term profits. And if you choose the public plan, you'll still get to choose your doctor and hospital.

3. We'll all save a bunch of money. The public health insurance option won't have to spend money on things like CEO bonuses, shareholder dividends, or excessive advertising, so it'll cost a lot less. Plus, the private plans will have to lower their rates and provide better value to compete, so people who keep their current insurance will save, too.

4. It will always be there for you and your family. A for-profit insurer can close, move out of the area, or just kick you off their insurance rolls. The public health insurance option will always be available to provide you with the health security you need.

5. And it's a key part of universal health care. No longer will sick people or folks in rural communities, or low-income Americans be forced to go without coverage. The public health insurance plan will be available and accessible to everyone. And for those struggling to make ends meet, the premiums will be subsidized by the government.

And in both Houses of Congress, the Democrats who were handsomely paid off to abandon their constituents' needs and work for the Insurance companies and HMOs are demanding a place at the table-- and veto power-- for their patrons. Blue Dogs are threatening to cross the aisle en masse and vote with the Republicans to kill the public option entirely unless they get assurances it will be a crippled and dysfunctional system. The Sunlight Foundation put together this chart of some of the Blue Dogs on the take who are throwing up the biggest problems for the people working seriously on mending the health care system.




UPDATE: The Deep Difference Between Kennedy And A Revolting Shill Like Baucus

Today's NY Times draws the clear distinction. Kennedy and all non-corrupt Democrats favor "a robust public health care plan, a government-sponsored entity that would compete with private insurers."

By contrast, Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who is chairman of the Finance Committee, has been working for months with the panel’s senior Republican, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, in the hope of forging a bipartisan bill, which would probably play down the option of a public plan.

Mr. Grassley opposes creation of a new government insurance program and says “we cannot afford the public health plan we have already,” referring to Medicare.

The insurance companies have provided Baucus and other shills, notably Chuck Schumer, with a "fallback plan," that will feature a public option that is designed to not work.

Public opinion polls suggest that many consumers would like to have the choice of a public plan. But insurance companies and Republican lawmakers say a public plan could drive private insurers out of business and lead eventually to a single-payer system run by the government.

Supporters of a public plan have been putting pressure on Mr. Baucus. Mr. Kennedy and 28 other senators signed up last week as co-sponsors of a resolution supporting creation of a public insurance option.

“Health care reform must include insurance reform, and health insurance reform must include the option of a federally backed health insurance plan,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, the chief sponsor of the resolution.

Afterthoughts from the inauguration

That's the back of 88-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens as he swore in Vice President Biden, accompanied by his wife Jill, their daughter Ashley, and his sons Hunter and Beau.

by Ken

It was, apparently, a good event to watch on TV, though I'm sure the people who were there will carry special memories of their own. Here are some fairly random things that linger in memory from the day.

SENATOR KENNEDY

It was great to see Sen. Ted Kennedy there, in apparently good spirits, fedora and all -- and this notwithstanding his having to be removed from the luncheon by stretcher following a seizure, which is apparently characteristic of his condition. (His condition was later reported to be stable.)

Who would have thought that the most lightly regarded of the Kennedy men would turn out to make the most enduring public contribution?

JUSTICE STEVENS

I mentioned the Rev. Joseph Lowery's rousing benediction yesterday. The other procedural highlight for me: the swearing in of Vice President Biden by Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who turns 89 in April.

Justice Stevens's tenacious endurance as the Court was being transformed into a rubber stamp for the rich and powerful has made him one of my personal heroes. He gave every indication of being as alert physically and mentally as everyone has been saying he is, so he seems ready for at least one more Court term. Thanks to his tenacity in outlasting Chimpy the Decider, he can now make his decision about continued service based entirely on personal considerations, and also worry less about what happens if circumstances take the decision out of his hands.

It's worth remembering that Justice Stevens was appointed by Gerald Ford (at the recommendation of Attorney General Edward Levi). If this makes him the most enduring legacy of the Ford administration, it's not a bad one.

OAF OF OFFICE
(not original, but I can't resist using it)

Justice Stevens certainly seemed more alert than Chief Justice John Roberts. The chief justice's conspicuous screw-up with the presidential oath seemed to me revealing of both participants' character. The president-elect came prepared. He had clearly taken the trouble to memorize the oath, whereas the chief justice couldn't be bothered, but then the president-elect froze when the chief justice got it wrong. To his credit, he didn't simply utter the oath correctly from memory; he was, after all, supposed to be repeating after Chief Justice Roberts. And he did eventually decide that that's what he should do. Of course by the time he made his adjustment, the chief justice had corrected himself, so they still weren't quite in sync.

Nevertheless, all the words got said -- including the controversial "so help me God" that's not included in the constitutionally prescribed oath but that regrettably seems to have become standard. (One assumes the chief justice didn't spring this on the president-elect without prior consultation.)

MEANWHILE IN WINGNUTTIA,
I: HE'S NOT REALLY PRESIDENT!

Pursuant to the burbled oath: The wingnut hordes promptly went berserk with the joyous news that President Obama is not therefore legally president! Oh, that crafty Chief Justice Roberts!

Oh, for Pete's sake! At this level of imbecility and insanity, these people should really exercise their imagined Second Amendment rights and buy lots and lots of guns and point them at their itty-bitty brains and just keep shooting -- for a better America.

UPDATE: Fox Noise's Chris Wallace won himself Keith Olbermann's Worst Person in the World citation tonight for taking up this very argument. Of course, strictly speaking, Fox Noise isn't "outside" Wingnuttia -- it's more like the professional arm of the howling loons. Still, if it lies in that Twilight Zone between formal Wingnuttia and and the mainstream infotainment-news media (see below), it does represent a wider scope than I was originally reporting.

MEANWHILE IN WINGNUTTIA,
II: INAUGURAL $$$$$ BULLSHIT

Not just the wingnuts but shamefully large segments of the infotainment-news media have been abuzz with factually bogus stories about the cost of the Obama inauguration -- most preposterously claiming it cost "nearly four times as much" as the second George W. Bush inauguration.

Aside from the conveniently forgotten fact that both W. inaugurations were heavy-breathing pay-to-play operations, where the massive fund-raising, with every attempt made to keep donors' identities secret, was just part of the ritual of business-as-usual under the Bush regime, whereby any dollar that didn't stink with corruption was considered a dollar wasted, or that the Obama inauguration accommodated vastly larger numbers of people, the Bush spending figures are conveniently purged of by far the largest component of the inaugural budget, security, which can easily count for three-quarters of the total tab. Media Matters' Eric Boehlert waded into the muck to try to bring some sense to this hodgepodge of real and imaginary numbers (left unexamined by lazy "reporters"), not to mention numbers that can't be compared directly.

It's reassuring to know that to the knee-jerk propagandists of the infotainment-news media, it's still the case that no lie is too outrageous or excessive if it serves the interests of the Extreme Right.

INAUGURAL MESS

While it's obviously true that yesterday's ceremonies accommodated numbers of people heretofore unimagined for an inauguration, this is not to say that, however much it cost, those people were accommodated adequately.

I'm hearing countless stories of official cluelessness and even chaos, stories of people with tickets being unable to figure out or find out where they were supposed to go, and if they found where they were supposed to go, then being left in limbo for hours, in many cases not to be admitted at all. Arrangements for organizing and moving the hordes seem to have been largely ineffective or simply absent. In at least one section, it appears that large numbers of people whose tickets weren't even checked were admitted ahead of patiently queued ticket-holders.

The size of the crowd would have made the situation hard to manage under the best circumstances, but the breakdown in planning, staffing, and execution seems to have been widespread. There are a lot of directions in which to point fingers (I'm hearing that the heaviest burden may lie with Senator Feinstein's joint congressional committee in charge of the inauguration), but surely most -- if not all -- of them eventually come back to Team Obama.

Is anyone else concerned by this series of staff breakdowns we seem to be seeing, despite the vaunted efficiency of the Obama operation? I still spend odd moments trying to figure out how the Pastor Rick Warren brouhaha was brought about. Even if you admit the sinister theory that people on the team thought it might be helpful in courting right-wing and specifically evangelical support to be seen treating its leftish and specifically LGBT supporters so badly, I just can't believe they're happy with the kind of uproar his invitation to deliver the inaugural invocation aroused. At the same time, how could they have not expected the kind of uproar they got?

Again with the debacle of the surgical exclusion of Bishop Gene Robinson from the "business" portion of Sunday's pre-inaugural concert -- i.e., the portion that was (a) attended by the Obama and Biden families and (b) televised: Even if we accept the Presidential Inauguration Committee's insistence that this was not its plan, how could there have been people at any level of the PIC too dense to understand the significance of the "error in executing the plan" which was built into the final event schedule? And possibly worse, why did nobody anywhere in the organization take the most cursory look at the final schedule and see the problem?

SPEAKING OF PASTOR RICK

I thought Pastor Rick's invocation was fine, starting from the premise that we allow the heavy religious overlay in these proceedings. At the same time, if Pastor Rick were a different sort of person, he might have made a point of saying something to rebut the ugly image of him which has been spread so wide -- based on his own words and actions.

MUSICAL MISHMOSH

It was a nice gesture, having the presidential swearing-in preceded by a brief "serious" musical offering played by the rainbow quartet of violinist Itzhak Perlman, clarinetist Anthony McGill, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pianist Gabriela Montero, and it's impossible not to admire their hardiness in performing -- not at all bundled up -- under those weather conditions. The actual offering, John Williams' Air and Simple Gifts, was concocted for the occasion. So-called "occasional" music doesn't have the happiest history, and this didn't impress me as a happy specimen.

Maybe some people found the "air" appealing. I was relieved when it gave way to the celebrated Shaker song "Simple Gifts." Probably the song is best known in the arrangements by Aaron Copland: the piano and orchestral versions of the song itself included among his Old American Songs, and its incorporation in the final section of his ballet Appalachian Spring. "'Tis the gift to be simple," the song starts, and Copland's renderings displayed that gift. The clutter Williams piled on showed that it's a far from universal gift, and I fear served to confirm the suspicion of the many people to whom this was a rare exposure to vaguely "classical" music that it's annoying claptrap.

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