Another rat flees the ship—are the Dems sinking?

Sen. Ben (“Cornhusker Kickback”) Nelson of Nebraska, with 31 percent support for re-election and in damage control mode over his tainted crucial vote for Obamacare, gave a strange interview to a Nebraska paper in which he said, “I think it was a mistake to take health care on as opposed to continuing to spend the time on the economy … I would have preferred not to be dealing with health care in the midst of everything else, and I think working on the economy would have been a wiser move.”

This is unbelievable. The Senate just passed the damn thing two weeks ago, with Nelson’s own hard-bought (or easily bought) approval being the culminating and climactic step that clinched the landmark Democratic victory: the Senate and House leaders are now negotiating with a view to final passage; and Nelson chooses this moment to say that he wishes they had never dealt with the bill, never passed the bill?

I’m not making any predictions. But Nelson’s shame-faced, angst-filled, ass-covering remarks, combined with the announcements by two left-wing influential Democratic senators that they are not running for re-election, combined with liberal Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s stunning 180 against the bill, combined with Speaker Pelosi’s uncharacteristic snipping at Obama, look like signs of a disintegrating Obamacare army, like Napoleon’s Grand Army capturing Moscow, its ultimate achievement, but finding an empty, deserted city with no one to surrender to them, followed by looting and a fire that destroyed most of the city, and a mere month after entering Moscow they abandoned it in disarray and confusion and headed back toward France, being picked off by Russian partisans, freezing to death in the early Russian winter, starving for lack of food, dropping dead in the snow, until a mere fragment of the once invincible army arrived back in Europe.

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John Hagan writes

Here’s the good news: Americans are finally understanding liberalism. Here’s the bad news: short of a radical change in the culture, it’s almost too late to do anything to reverse the incredible damage liberalism has done.

The election of Obama and the Democrats has unleashed a profound sickness into the body politic. We are seeing liberalism for what it really is without its usual constraints. It’s as if every possible malignancy that has been hiding behind the liberal mask is now out in the open. This is a profoundly dangerous time for America. The Democrats are indeed imploding. Men like Nelson of Nebraska are dissolving before our eyes as the contradictions he has embraced are eating him alive.

This chaos is the inevitable result of a liberal society. Still, I’ll take this situation any day over the slow death of a Bush administration, or a McCain administration. The average American at least has a chance to understand what is being done to him whereas under so-called conservative rule we were all just muddling along.

LA replies:

John, this is a fantastic statement of where we are now. It’s so good I just want to repeat it:

The election of Obama and the Democrats has unleashed a profound sickness into the body politic. We are seeing liberalism for what it really is without its usual constraints. It’s as if every possible malignancy that has been hiding behind the liberal mask is now out in the open. This is a profoundly dangerous time for America. The Democrats are indeed imploding. Men like Nelson of Nebraska are dissolving before our eyes as the contradictions he has embraced are eating him alive.

That’s one of the best comments ever posted at VFR.

John Hagan replies:

Thank you. I’m feeling good that this sickness is out in the open. It’s time. It’s past time.

Ferg writes:

Well, it is tempting to think so. However, they all seem to ban together in a rat pack when faced with conservative opposition. I will withhold celebrating until the votes are in on the final bill.

Here in Minnesota I don’t think we have a Senate race this year so I will be looking at other races. Still, it looks somewhat promising.

LA replies:

For the record, I wasn’t trying to persuade anyone of anything or make anyone think that something is going to happen. I have no idea what is going to happen and I was not making any sort of prediction. But sometimes there is a concatenation of events that hits you, and it has a certain shape and meaning, and so you write it down. There’s no claim that it’s the final or true meaning, but these glimpses that we have from time to time are part of the unfolding picture and they are worth expressing in their own right.

It is like when I saw Sarah Palin interviewed on O’Reilly a couple of months ago and I had a glimpse of her as a more effective and serious politician, and that opened up certain possibilities of her as the possible nominee of the Republican party. When I said that, it was not a prediction. It was a possibility that I was seeing for the first time, or seeing in a new way.

January 7

James N. writes:

Re John Hagan’s comment: I don’t think the election of Obama has precipitated a crisis so much as it has revealed a crisis which has existed for many, many years.

Only a nation deeply in crisis could have elevated such a person to a high leadership position. The fact that we perceive the election of Obama as causing a crisis—well, that’s part of the crisis itself.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 07, 2010 12:33 AM | Send