Mickey's New Friends

Apologies for the lack of posting, but February's been pretty rough. [You've just been watching the Olympics, haven't you? -- ed. Only to double check Nate Silver's medal predictions! Snot-nosed little punk always using his "numbers" and his "math" to make predictions ... that's not the Mickey Kaus way!]

Anyway, after spending the week rattling off several "organized labor will ruin America" posts notable only for their redundancy, Mickey decided to finish off a pretty lousy month with a pretty lousy pep talk for Congressional Democrats:

The Real Reason Cynical Dem Pols Should Vote for the Health Care Bill

Good start there. I would have gone with "Listen Up, Jerkwads" for the headline, but that's why Mickey's the pro. The gist of the post is that Republicans might be actually -- gasp! -- lying about the horrible things that health care reform does, and that the best thing for Democrats would be to pass the bill and show the public that the Republicans might have been exaggerating about "socialized medicine" and "death panels" and the like. [Which Republicans, exactly? -- ed. You know, the ones that say things about Obama supporting "a panel of independent experts making end-of-life recommendations in order to save costs that have an effect at an individual level" ... you know, those Republicans.]

So Mickey makes this pitch, the most pathetically tepid endorsement of health care reform to date -- "Democrats should pass health care reform because it doesn't suck as much as Republicans say it sucks" -- and his commenters respond with the enlightened discourse that we've come to expect from Mickey's readers:

Request an explanation why you don't seem to give a hoot about what this monstrosity costs.

Annihilate what remains of the public fisc? Or become France? Thanks, no.

How many deaths and needlessly limited and painful lives will the "lack of innovation" cause, which, Mickey cynically hopes will not happen for a few years?

Got that, Mickey? You're cynically supporting the deaths of thousands of people by half-assedly throwing your support behind passage of health care reform. Maybe Bizarro Charles Lane will come to your defense.

In case you haven't gotten the word, socialism never works for anything under any circumstances, anywhere, anytime. But the dreamers keep dreaming for some reason only they understand.

That second sentence is almost a Joni Mitchell lyric.

Note that for the first time in eight solid months, Mickey (a) admits that the Democrats' plans for health care reform won't lead to outright disaster, and (b) acknowledges that the Republican attacks are wildly hyperbolic. For this affront, his audience -- his real audience, not the wide-eyed-liberals-in-need-of-some-hard-truths that he pretends he's addressing -- calls him a communist, and not a soul defends him.

But, uh, well ... hey, aren't unions a bunch of ridiculous jerks? Right? Guys?