There are many kinds of porn. In the modern vernacular there's "food porn," which describes gastronomic perfection so delicious, it's practically obscene. There's also "torture porn," made famous by Mel Gibson's movies, Rob Zombie's movies, 24, Fox News Channel and, of course, the Bush administration. And then there are the too numerous to list forms of regular old "porn" porn.
I'm not so thrilled to announce that there's a new kind of "porn" in town. What we've been witnessing during this health care reform process can easily be defined as "bipartisanship porn." It's a display of bipartisanship so obscene and excessive that it borders on perverse. But unlike most of the other forms of porn, it's not even fun to look at chiefly because it involves the shriveled mugs of Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus.
Today, following a killer 12 hours of fresh air in which it looked like bipartisanship porn was dying, Robert Gibbs let fly in the White House press room:
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration remains committed to drawing Republican support for the bill, particularly in the Senate."I don't know why we would short-circuit that now," Gibbs told reporters.
He said the White House believes some Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee "are still working in a constructive way to get reform through the Senate and ultimately to the president's desk."
After everything that's gone down this month? Sheesh. Get a room.
Gibbs has dropped these comments on the same day when Rahm Emanuel finally admitted that the Republicans aren't at all interested in voting for health care reform.
It's the same day when the New York Times reported that the congressional Democrats are prepared to jettison the Republicans once and for all in order to pass a real health care reform bill.
It's within the same week when both Grasshole and Jon Kyl made it perfectly clear that the Republicans will not vote for any health care reform bill short of something that abolishes Medicaid, privatizes Social Security and replaces Secretary Sebelius with Carrie Prejean.
And it's following several weeks when the entire Wingnut-Industrial Complex injected numerous lies, distortions and actual firearms into the health care debate. This succeeded in scaring the white plastic belts and warm-up suits off scores of old people and convinced a supermajority of Fox News viewers that affordable, reliable and portable health insurance is somehow the Fourth Reich (because we all know how much neo-Nazis love mixed-race liberal politicians).
During the battle over the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, we observed that the Republicans were only interested in sabotaging the president's agenda. Their goal was to play along with this notion of bipartisanship just enough to find gap through which they could drop their psycho-bombs into the legislation and dash away -- brazenly shouting "So long, suckers!" as they went. Like the well-known fable about the scorpion and the frog, it's their nature. This is what they do. Their only path out of exile is to sabotage anything and everything in the Democratic agenda. When the Democrats fail, the Republicans rise again. They've been perfectly honest and up front about this, too, as evidenced by the famous "fail" remarks from their impotent de facto leader Mr. Limbaugh.
So why are they being allowed to do it again, this time with something as critical as health care reform?
The answer can be illustrated by outlining the three biggest bipartisanship porn fetishists, if you will. The White House, centrist Democrats and the establishment press.
The last group first. The establishment press, the Villagers, believe that the only path to seriousness is bipartisanship. It's a leading ingredient in the conventional wisdom cocktails served at various inside-Washington media mixers. It goes without saying that this is a standard reserved for Democrats only. When the Republicans controlled Washington not so long ago, the establishment press was all about fetishizing Republican virility -- how masculine their packages looked in a flight suit and how easily the Democrats could be clubbed over the head with its sheer bulbous-ness. Now that the Democrats are in power, however, bipartisanship is mandatory for being considered "very serious." It's why very few members of the Progressive Caucus have managed to sneak onto a Sunday show. Not bipartisan enough and therefore not very serious.
The centrist Democrats, meanwhile, are obsessed with bipartisanship porn because it helps them to look more like Republicans. This has a dual benefit in that it attracts the establishment press, it appeases their more conservative states/districts and it calms the nerves of their financiers in the various lobbies and PACs -- in this case, the health care industry. I would lump Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln, the Nelsons and Joe Lieberman into this category.
And finally, there's the White House.
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