Circular Firing Squads

I stopped reading Jane Hamsher's website, Fire Dog Lake, a few years back. Ditto Glenn Greenwald. In both cases, I started to detect that most endemic of left-wing traits - taking fellow-travelers to task for alleged deviations from the true path as a greater threat to all that is good and true in the world than one's actual political opponents. Mix in a heady stew of chutzpah, hubris, and the sense of entitlement that comes from being feted as a "player" in this medium (as well, in Greenwald's case, as an ego roughly the size of Belgium), and the results can be pretty ugly.

Consider this post by John Cole, reporting on an attempt by Jane Hamsher to smear him that goes, well, slightly wrong. In the midst of a long comment thread that deals with details of Cole's alleged deviations from leftist orthodoxy as well as Hamsher's well self-publicized position that it would have been better to scrap the health care reform bill as it was written than to pass it, we have a marvelous summary of one of the many weaknesses of the left, complete with some ad hominem to keep one reading:

Here’s something that simple-minded twits like you are almost wholly incapable of understanding. Just because the Affordable Care Act does not contain every dream measure liberals wanted included in the final bill, that does not somehow mitigate the final legislation from having a sizable and very tangible impact in the day-to-day lives of millions of Americans. It’s a victory that, although incomplete, is still entirely worth celebrating.

That you could be so gleeful and obtuse in demagoguing something that is providing long-sought after relief to your fellow citizens is a rather shameful display.

This latter position - that we are actually worse off with the passage of the Affordable Care Act than we were before - is simply not supported by the facts. One can believe it in the same way people believe there is no such thing as global warming, or believe in the tooth fairy. One can believe it so passionately that one is quite willing to jettison even more facts in support of the notion that ACA is nothing more or less than a corporate sell-out, was always planned to be a corporate sell-out, and that no one except the American people wanted a better bill.

Too sad. Those so passionately committed to a particular policy goal can become too blind to notice that progress - tremendous, beneficial progress for millions of Americans - has actually been achieved by our broken, limited system of governance.

This whole episode is very tragic. It is also just more evidence (as if any were needed) that the American left is constitutionally incapable of gaining, let alone wielding, power in an effective manner. When matters of process and procedure, attaining limited half-measures in pursuit of longer-term goals that are more generous, and highlighting the passage of the most significant piece of social legislation since I was a baby seem to be worse crimes than believing the President is a terrorist-pal, Muslim-liberation theologian-Marxist bent on destroying white America and making Amiri Baraka our poet laureate - well, as far as I'm concerned those folks cease to function as serious thoughtful commenters on our public life.

I have no desire to deny that I would have much preferred all sorts of good things in HCR. I also see the many good things that are in the ACA as it passed, and celebrate them. For some, it is just easier to pout, then shout, because one's own toys weren't included in the gift-giving, and blame all those phony fake-liberals for destroying this moment of victory for all the good things in this world.

Politics is a dirty, nasty business, and one should take one's victories where and when they actually come, rather than as we wish they had.