re: Scott Brown

(from today's NY Times online)

Marlene Connolly's rationale for voting Republican is a sorry one. If she and similar voters think Scott Brown and the Republicans are going to do better at creating jobs, reforming health care, conducting (permanent) warfare, reining in spending, and any number of other things high on Americans' list of important issues, she's delusional. She cast a frying-pan-into-the-fire vote. She voted for a bonafide, morally challenged idiot.

That said, as a progressive I think it's good Coakley lost. She wouldn't have changed anything in DC more than Brown will. This election was not about health care. It was mainly about Obama, about his myriad broken promises, about his rolling over for Wall Street and appointing its lobbyists to his administration, most of all about his utter failure to lead. It was also about a Congress bought and paid for by banks and insurance companies and big pharma, about a Senate majority leader who is as firm as a limp noodle.

Now the Times is telling me in a headline that "Obama Weighs Shift in Health Plan, Seeking G.O.P. Backing". What a joke! The guy is clueless. Still with the bipartisanship. Did anyone ever explain to him that politics is all about partisanship? That without partisanship there is no progress? That the only things in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos? He's doing the exact opposite of what he should do - rather than setting a progressive agenda and doing all in his power to achieve it, he's rolling over to expose his soft underbelly to a party that has no ideas, no philosophy, and buckets of hypocrisy - and Scott Brown is their poster boy. The Obama administration is being eviscerated by the political equivalent of the Three Stooges. What does that say about the governing competence of Democrats?

Beyond defaulting on every promise he's ever made - and worse, causing people to lose the hope he created in them - Obama doesn't deserve to hold power. I'm done with Clinton-Obama Democrats, and (for the third or fourth time in my voting life) lesser-of-the-evil votes. From now on, it's progressive candidates only. If unprincipled Democrats lose because I and enough others refuse our votes, it's on their heads.