The New Republic

Generally agree about the merits of the trigger option. But since when was the threshold for getting anything AT ALL done in the Senate 60 votes? Did W have 60 republican votes the entire time he was in office? If not, why did the rules suddently change as soon as Obama took office? Am I the only one who wonders about this?

- miceelf

September 9, 2009 at 1:52pm

For those who didn't catch my devastating indictment of Jon Chait's devastating indictment of Cokie Roberts's devastating indictment of those who indict the rest of us for not being one of hundreds of hopelessly conflicting and contradictory True Believers out there I've pasted it below. Now, both Kilgore and Chait may well be intent only on pointing out the intellectual bancruptcy of the brain-dead Republican centrists in the Congress. But though I am partial to equating the term "brain-dead" with many things Republican, I suspect not in this case. Instead, they seem intent more on drawing a proper distinction between those things a centrist who is not brain-dead might be willing to compromise on and those things so intellectually and morally pure and sacred, anyone willing to compromise here must be brain-dead by definition. Their own definition, for example. What is particularly problematic, however is this point by Ezra Klein: If conservatives are right that a restructured market would compel insurers to cut costs and increase competition and generally clean up their behavior, then that's good enough. But if liberals are proven right that a handful of new regulations isn't sufficient to create a working insurance market, then the public option would "trigger" into existence and we'd give that solution a try. george: First, of course, both liberal and conservative members of Congress have worked hand in glove with the health care industry for years now to create a mind-boggling health care quagmire that threatens literally to drag the economy down into a hole so deep we may well yearn for the good old days of the housing bubble collapse. Secondly, do any of us really know how big the gap might be between Klein's abstractions above and the manner in which any passed legislation will play out "in reality"? As much as I support a "public option", I think the more crucial components now revolve around 1] ending the "preexisting condition" bullshit from the insurance industry 2] reining in the outrageous costs of many pharmaceuticals and 3] making certain that, one way or the other, EVERY American has access to decent health care at a cost that won't bankrupt them. Is this necessarily predicated on the "public option"? I don't know. But showing voters they are prepared to actually crack down hard on those hellbent only on raking in the bucks off our medical calamities will certinly instill more confisdence in me that a public option will not just be one more flush down the semantic toilet. george walton Hmm... Chait seems to be saying this: As a social psychologist Cokie Roberts will make a great political pundit someday. Just not anytime soon. I find that an odd reaction to this: “I think that often where I am is just in the middle. The middle is often the commonsensical place to be. The notion that one side is right and one side is wrong is generally, as one finds in life, not the case.” Cokie Roberts What makes this something to be dunked condescendingly in irony? I know little or nothing about where Cokie's head is "on the issues". But this point of view is very well stated about political commitments in general. In fact, the very idea of democracy itself is predicated in large part on it. After all, if Right and Wrong can be discerned objectively we would be better off living in a world where philosopher kings handed down the prescriptions and the proscriptions. Why engage in futile and caustic debates about something we can know for certain? JC: The notion that you can determine a sensible position simply by stopping halfway between the Democratic and Republican stances is one of the enduring fallacies of public life. george: Again, maybe this is what Robert means above. I don't really know. But being a moderate and a centrist does not necessarily mean yanking out a slide rule and calculating some hypothetical truth exactly half way between Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh. It simply means that most political "truths" have little or nothing to do with either one of them. Instead, it is the recognition that, regarding the issues that most dearly affect us, ideology and dogma are always the most dangerous props around. So, how far is Chaitt from that? JC: ....many liberals dismissed evidence that conditions in Iraq improved toward the end of the Bush administration. george: Yes, this is true. But that's not what the reactionaries want from them, is it? What they want is for liberals to acknolwedge this AND agree it justifies all that came before it. Is that what a moderate or a centrist must do? JC: A huge proportion of self-styled “centrist” thought simply boils down to surrendering one’s own capacity to make normative judgments about politics and public policy. george: Okay, Chait should choose an issue embedded in both "politics and public policy"; then outline what he construes to be a "normative judgement" that flows necessarily from his own set of moral and political values. Then compare and contrast it to that which he construes to be the tact moderates and centrists take instead. Let's lose the abstractions and bring this all down to earth. JC: Of course, the centrists portray their behavior not as unprincipled buck- passing but as an elevated form of civic virtue. george: Name some. Site specific examples of this. Provide more details regarding actual positions taken on actual issues by actual men and women. I simply have no clue as to what he means by "an elevated form of civic virtue". In philosophy venues something like this is often referred to as a "psychologism". psychologism: in philosophy, the view that problems of epistemology (i.e., of the validity of human knowledge) can be solved satisfactorily by the psychological study of the development of mental processes. In this sense? How does he bind together or cleave apart the crucial relationships between human psychology and the mental processes used to draw conclusions about civic virtues? What is his opinion about the limitations of epistemology and logic here? Mine flow from the philosophy of existentialism. In particular an existentialism that starts with the assumption [and that is all it can be] that God does not exist. How do we resolve moral and political conflicts in a world without an omniscient and omnipotent point of view? Tentatively and precariously for starters george walton d/a

- iambiguous

September 9, 2009 at 2:07pm

Ed, I think the fix is in on the 'trigger'. Obama's chief concern in the public option debate was placating the progressive wing: never part of campaign; small part of plan; impact not really that great. He all but endorsed a 'trigger' and handed the progressives the rope they can hang themselves with if they vote against HC because of it.

- CAMtwo

September 10, 2009 at 11:08am