And Who Emails This Shit?

Shorter David Brooks: I'm not a Hillary-hater, but here's an anecdote about the cold, calculating, absolutist bitch that might give you pause.

Why we're congenitally incapable of doing "shorters", or being succinct: Health Care! 1993! John "Blue Dog" Cooper, the last man to lose an election to Fred Dumbo Thompson! The Educated Class rooting against Hillary!

Money Shot: "Cooper is, of course, a man who has been burned in the past. But it is legitimate to wonder if adults can really change all that much. A defter politician would have reached out to Cooper and made an attempt to address the concerns he represents."

"If adults can change that much!"   "A defter politician reaching out!"  That's rich, really, coming from someone who voted for Bush twice. And the "concern" Cooper represented was the insurance industry, not thousands of Tennesseans worried that they might be forced to receive affordable healthcare.

Is Brooks so stupid as to believe this? No. He's got a terminal case of Reagantotism, made that much worse by the fact that he, like a certain Presidential candidate Cooper has endorsed, was actually in his twenties when this magical land of Ponies and Unity was unrolled. It was made that much worse when the soft bigotry of low journalistic standards bestowed the phony title of "The Conservative Pundit Liberals Love" on his passive-aggressive AV-nerd chatter.   Now he's left trying to pickup Blue Dog Democrats in a seedy dive by repeating the only line that ever got him laid, even if it was twenty years ago.  

Skinny: Healthcare, of course, is the sine qua non of the Hillary hater, the intersection of Republican Entitlement Boulevard and Sexism Street, and its astonishingly long life is all one needs to justify throwing Brooks to the ground, grabbing his wrist, and making him hit himself until he cries, "Okay, I'm a Hillary Hater!" three times. The fact that Mrs. Clinton was tabbed to head her husband's task force was--and is--offered as evidence of some insidious take-over plot, and Mrs. Clinton was--and is--portrayed as some sort of power-mad harpy who dared presume herself the equal of Our Elected Officials. The plan was defeated thanks to the efforts of Democratic insurance-industry mouthpieces like Cooper and Pat Moynihan, after a massive industry-financed scare campaign which has kept national healthcare off the agenda for nearly twenty years.   A more vindictive man than myself could possibly be hoping that a sizable percentage of the people who helped stem the tide of reasonable concern back them find themselves lacking heath insurance today. And needing it.

If the cupidity of the Reaganauts was ever more in evidence I, for one, can't think of where. If we need a finer example of the will of the people being thwarted by the unequal access of big money concerns to our whorish politicians you'll have to find it for me. And yet! As Brooks, no Hilary-hater! tells the tale fifteen years later, on Super Dooper Times Three Tuesday, coincidentally, the whole matter boiled down to Mrs. Clinton being rude to John Fucking Cooper. It was the Congress of the United States that botched healthcare. It was Bill Clinton's program, not his wife's, just as Iraq is George Bush's war, not, well, Bill Clinton's wife's. That it was mishandled in its public-relations effort, and insufficiently ardent of the rectums of puffed-up politicos like Cooper are items we may put forward for discussion. But the clear winners were the people who owned their votes, and a generation of Hitlery biographers, and the clear loser was democracy.

While We're At It, Gimme Your Lunch Money: Assuming he's within shouting distance of the truth, something we would not necessarily assume from John Cooper's public record, how many politicians have told opponents "We'll bury you," in private? Of how many males is it quoted back as evidence of rapine, or suggested as something simply beyond the pale of politics? I have refused to support Senator Clinton's campaign, but if she'd like to borrow a shovel I'll be happy to oblige.