Betrayal from Within: A Tale of Democratic Disintegration

It was surprising to read the despair and shock from the left this morning. We knew this was going to happen. Not only is it historically predictable, but given the economy, the Democrats are fortunate that they hung on to the Senate.

The Republicans ran on repealing ObamaCares, but they cannot accomplish this without a 60 vote majority in the Senate, or a 67 vote super majority to override a Presidential veto. The Senate is the higher of the two legislative bodies, the one Americans didn’t entrust to Republicans/ GOP rebranded as Tea Partiers.

No, the Senate is not a place for crazies because the Senate matters. The House crazies will be up for reelection again in two years, right after they start investigating the “Anti-Americans” in Congress and of course, cherry on top, accuse them of getting a blow job. Will they waste our tax dollars pursuing this so Eric, Jimmy and Johnny can make tee-vee appearances every day? You betcha.

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Sen. Jim DeMint told Good Morning America repealing ObamaCares is his number one priority. When asked if he would move toward scrapping the plan he said, “Oh, yeah.”

Jim knows he can’t accomplish this. He’s just saying it to pander to the morons who voted Republican last night but are anti-big banks. My god, it hurts.

But what hurts more than all of this, my liberal friends, is how the liberal base stabbed themselves in the back while complaining about how the Democrats never handle power well. I think it’s time for us all to reassess our comfort level with power, our understanding of how government works, and the importance of unified front of support for our President and elected officials, especially when they are passing something historic and difficult like healthcare.

Of course I am not suggesting that we don’t hold the Democratic leadership accountable, but are we really children where we can only see those two extremes? Liberals fault the Democratic officials for the exact same flaws they evince as the base. Liberals spent the last two years screaming bloody murder about President Obama and the Democrats letting them down.

They don’t have to worry about that so much anymore.

No more concerns about whether a bill is good enough, or whether so and so should have rights. Those options are not even on the table anymore.

Now we have to go back to fighting to keep Obama’s administration from being Clintonized. We have to fight to hang on to ObamaCares. So our petty infighting is over.

And we can once again settle in to the comforting position of being attacked daily.

I, for one, would have rather supported the Democrats and the President with all of their faults, thereby not killing voter enthusiasm months before the election, and worked toward holding them accountable to us with great investigative work like we see certain liberals engaging in—but not the endless moaning about the public option.

The public option was never going to happen. If you think it was, you don’t understand Washington. It COULD have evolved into the public option with a Democratic majority, and one day it might. But for now, we’ll be lucky if we get to keep ObamaCares.

I’ve written about this before and been besieged with angry liberals who explain to me that I am nothing but a cheerleader, because they are mature enough to criticize and they have that right. Sure, they do. But they also have a responsibility to do so responsibly and accurately or else, do not complain today when the inevitable result of the blood you took daily from the Democratic Party turns on you.

Now we have a House of Representatives who first and foremost will want to waste our tax dollars campaigning for 2012 by investigating every Democrat and President Obama and his administration. Nothing will get done.

This is the result of a bad economy and predictable midterm electoral struggles, but also a failure on our part to support our party and our President. We allowed the Right to inaccurately attack them daily. Soon after the GOP hissed their talking points in the morning, liberals would be screaming the same exact complaints in the afternoon, all the while claiming to be independent and thinking for themselves. And then they are shocked when the blood bath comes.

This blood bath could not have happened without two years of bitter, it’s not good enough tantrum throwing from the left. This has been said before, but no one wanted to hear it. We would rather parrot the Right by playing outraged and offended, but it’s the truth.

We chose not to grow up and so we lost power, as we should. Until we can govern like we mean it and until our base has the stomach and the fortitude to be loyal supporters while being fierce critics – the sort who would encircle our own when they are under attack instead of stepping aside and letting the right wing kill them – we won’t have power for long.

And so it is that we held our breath during those two years, knowing it was all we were going to get and pushing through as many paradigm shifting changes as we could before the Republicans got a bigger bull horn from which to say no.

I am a fierce liberal, in that I am bonded to the principles of equality, egalitarianism and opportunity for all but the last two years have been sobering. I see that the far Left is no less demanding in their call for purity. It’s as if these folks have never been in a relationship before, because there is no perfection of purity awaiting us.

This failure, this loss, is our own. We earned it by not growing up. Perhaps instead of grousing about how stupid Americans are for voting the same clowns who got us into this mess back into office, we can take this moment to reflect upon how we got here and what we can learn for 2012, when I do anticipate a sweeping win for Obama and a Democratic majority restored to the House.

After all, the Republicans will be reminding America of what they are all about for the next two years, and Americans will not be pleased by the gridlock, the investigations, the failure to address the People’s concerns, and the gloating frat boy atmosphere, made all the more poisonous by the freshman Tea Partiers who haven’t a clue how to govern and will soon find themselves unable to do anything they promised except glorify themselves on tee-vee as the anti-Obama hero to the far Right.

For the next two years, we will probably have a more unified Left, one that rallies to their side when under attack, because Liberals know how to be the underdog. What we need to be thinking about is how we can be leaders who hold power responsibly and effectively, starting with the base.

Sarah Jones

Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.

Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.

Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

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