While I'm away

I changed the sub-title; the old one seems far too smug. The new one is a piece of a quote from a four-year old post of mine called "The best things".

Compassion

The Washington Post is reporting that “[t]he Obama administration will consider the new federal insurance marketplace a success if 80 percent of users can buy health-care plans online.” A success for whom? For the Democrats? For the Obama Administration? For Obama's "legacy"? Not for the unlucky 20% who need health insurance and can’t buy it.

As JohnE over at Ace of Spades points out:

This, of course, includes the nearly 5 million people who have already been booted off their plans due to Obamacare. I suppose it's a success if 20% of them, or 1 million people, are unable to purchase insurance because the website is glitchy. Wait, wasn't this law passed in large part to "help those who were unable to purchase health insurance"? I seem to recall that being a thing.

Oh, well. Eggs and omelettes.

Today on Meet The Press, Nancy Pelosi insisted that the health insurance policies being cancelled were not because of the Affordable Care Act. You have to read her whole exchange with David Gregory to get a sense of how bizarre it is but here’s a snippet:

But that doesn't mean that there was anything in the law that said if you like what you had before 2010 you couldn't keep it.

Here’s what NBC said two days ago in an investigative report entitled “Insurers, state officials say cancellation of health care policies just as they predicted”:

In comments filed in August and December 2010, America’s Health Insurance Plans -- a trade group representing 1,300 insurance plans — urged the administration to “reconsider” grandfathering rules because they were too stringent to allow many to keep their policies.

In the first round of comments, AHIP stated that under the administration’s proposed regulations, “The percentage of individual market policies losing grandfathered status … will likely exceed the 40-67 percent range” and warned that could cause “disruptions” for those who wish to keep their policies.

When those proposed rules weren’t changed, AHIP again wrote in December, “We believe that more can and should be done to protect the interests of consumers who wish to maintain their existing coverage.”

That “first round of comments” happened in August of 2010. CNN reminds us that Republicans reacted to AHIP’s warnings shortly thereafter:

Senate Democrats voted unanimously three years ago to support the Obamacare rule that is largely responsible for some of the health insurance cancellation letters that are going out.

In September 2010, Senate Republicans brought a resolution to the floor to block implementation of the grandfather rule, warning that it would result in canceled policies and violate President Barack Obama’s promise that people could keep their insurance if they liked it.

In the round-table segment of Meet The Press, David Gregory said this:

And people will say this is like Katrina; I think it's more like Iraq. That was about life and death, this is not. That's not the comparison. The comparison is everybody looked at Bush through the prism of Iraq. Here, I think people are going to look at Obama through the implementation of Obamacare. He wants to talk about something else.

Gregory seems to be saying that Katrina was about life and death, but the Affordable Care Act is not.

That’s not what President Obama was claiming when he argued that we had to pass the Act. Speaking about a campaign supporter who died of breast cancer, he said:

She didn’t have insurance. She couldn’t afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it.

It turns out Obama didn’t have his story straight but these kinds of anecdotes are exactly what sold people on ObamaCare: people who don’t have health insurance can’t get the health care they need and sometimes that means they die. And the Affordable Care Act was going to insure that didn’t happen any longer. That sounds like life and death to me.

The Administration that thinks leaving 20% of the people who need health insurance hanging is “a success”; the California Congresswoman who continues to lie about the damage done to those who are losing the health insurance she swears she wants everyone to have; the television pundit who sees health insurance as a political football rather than a matter of life and death. None of them seem to realize that the 20%; the cancelled policy-holders; the currently insured and currently uninsured whose only hope for insurance they can afford depends on getting through a broken website and praying there’s something on the other side they can afford - all these are human beings whose lives are being upended by the hubris, dishonesty, and incompetence of those who conceived, sold, and implemented ObamaCare.

I wonder if those responsible will understand the reality of what they’ve done if people start dying, or will that, also, be brushed aside as politics.

Note to self

In thinking about a recent comment to one of my posts, I went looking for something I’d written. I did so by searching for the word “profaned” and, to my surprise, I found two old posts that contained that word. Who knew?

I re-read both of them and decided to drag them into the present, for my sake rather than for anyone else’s. When I spend too long in the Doomsday Predictor that is the political part of the Internet and find myself believing that all is lost, most people are idiots, and “they” are a waste of fresh air and sunshine, I need to remind myself of what I wrote, of what I believed and, truly, still believe.

So here they are, not in the order they were written but in the order in which they make sense to me today:

Raindrops on roses

The best things

Raindrops on roses

[Just for the record: I object strongly to using the word “suck” as an epithet. But you play the hand you’re dealt.]

I read Reclusive Leftist for the first time in a while and found a new post, the first since September 30 and the first substantive one since September 7. Entitled “I hate the world”, it begins:

When you’re off in a vortex of writing, totally disconnected from the real world, it’s easy to forget just how godawful the world really is. God, it just sucks.

Then I read a post by Megan McArdle entitled “Explaining The Anger That Consumes Debate on the Web”. McArdle cites the recent Scientific American article on sacred values versus secular values and says:

For me, this resonates with my growing disgust at the level of anger in the blogosphere. I don't mean irritation, pointed jibes, or even spirited discussion; I mean an aggressive revelling in rage.

According to McArdle, it’s the Hell’s brew of sacred values and money that explains weblogs wallowing in wrath:

we're fighting over a lot of taboo trade-offs, in a context where we can't help but bring money into it. The result is the rage of people who cannot bear to see their sacred ideals profaned--and worse, to see the profaners walking around apparently happy. Only a primal scream of outrage will do.

I disagree with McArdle. (End of world to follow soon.) I think people just like being angry. Not justifiably angry - that’s tiresome and burdensome and requires, like, you know, morality and thought and maybe even - gasp - action. No, justifiably angry is a drag. Self-righteously angry on the other hand? That’s a blast. Self-righteous anger feeds and is fed by so many other delightful demons: arrogance; moral superiority; selective blindness; bonding with the group against The Other; intellectual snobbery; dehumanization, even demonization, of the “enemy”; a little data drop out; a lot of data drop out; that nasty little tickle in the gut when a point - however cheap, however cruel, however dishonest - is scored and that even nastier little glow when a cheap, cruel, dishonest point is applauded and linked!

Self-righteous anger is fun, it’s invigorating, it gets people out of bed in the morning. Self-righteous anger drives blog hits, sells cable shows, makes sweeping claims without the trouble of investigating those claims or backing up those claims and - even better - without the need for context or introspection or, Heaven forfend, balance. It constantly ups the ante: everyone who lives on and for self-righteous anger has to be angrier than he or she was yesterday and angrier than anyone else who is self-righteously angry: This sucks, that sucks, the whole world sucks.

And it’s all your, his, hers, their fault.

Sacred values? To someone who lives on and for self-righteous anger, the only sacred value is whatever he or she is angry about today.

The best things

Cassandra has written an amazing post, rich with themes to be explored. She writes of the political and the cultural and she is concerned but hopeful. Not so two of those she links: Vanderleun talks of national diminishment; InstaPunk talks of despair, of an existential crisis. The distress of both those writers is driven by politics in general, by Obama in particular.

Yet, at this moment in my life, I read Cassandra’s words not as a call for political solutions but as a reminder of the need for private virtue independent of what our government or our neighbors are doing. Cassandra writes:

What if the malaise that seems to have taken hold of America is not the disease itself but the cure for what ails us?

If we are able to turn this malaise into a cure, to grow larger than Vanderleun’s smallness, to replace Instapunk’s crisis with opportunity, it will not be because we elect a different President or Congressman or Governor; because we successfully pass a particular piece of legislation or successfully thwart it; because we write the perfect editorial or post; because we make the most cogent argument. If we as a nation are able to regain our energy, our surefootedness, our faith in our ability - and our desire - to “continue improving our lot”, to “leave the world a better place than we found it” we will do so based not on what we do in the political realm but on what we do as individuals, how we each live our lives.

Twenty-one years ago, I read an essay in Time magazine. I tore it out and it has traveled with me ever since. The entire essay is worth reading; written by Alan Paton, the author of Cry, the Beloved Country, it pays homage to the power and beauty of words. But despite my own love of words that’s not why I treasured it.

I’m not particularly religious; I’m not even sure I’m particularly spiritual - whatever that means. And yet one of the quotations from Paton’s essay resonated so strongly that it has lived on my bulletin board for all these years, transcribed by me in fading purple ink on fading purple paper. Its impact has never diminished and it remains for me a remarkable description of courage and faith:

In the year 1652 when throughout England all things sacred were either profaned or neglected, this church was built by Sir Robert Shirley, Bart., Whose special praise it is to have done the best things in the worst times and to have hoped them in the most calamitous.

Merry Christmas.

One tough cookie

[Comments are not allowed for this post. I’ve realized that some posts I do are in the nature of a cri de coeur and I would prefer not to see comments about them. You are certainly welcome to email me about this post.]

I loathed the Clintons for 16 years. Long before anyone had heard of Monica Lewinsky, a coworker asked me how I - a dedicated feminist - could so despise a genuine liberal like Bill Clinton. “Because,” I replied, “I went to school with guys like him. Now they’re all working as used car salesmen and sleeping with their secretaries.” Through all the years of his Presidency my view of him as fundamentally sleazy never wavered.

As for Hillary, my initial dislike was based on her having the bad taste to marry Bill combined with a disdain for her decision to subjugate her own brilliance and political connections to serve his interests. Not to mention her backing down from her decision to keep her own name when it conflicted with Bill’s political interest. My dislike grew into loathing when she so totally screwed up her universal health care assignment early in Bill’s first term. I believed devoutly in the importance of this issue and believed - still believe - that the secrecy with which she surrounded her effort was both wrong and impolitic.

What hardened my loathing for both of them once and for all was their destruction of feminism. True, institutional feminism had already begun to self-destruct with its embrace of people of color throughout the world who had suffered under the lash of white patriarchy. The inability of institutional feminists to see that this meant embracing male people of color who treated women worse than they had ever been treated by the white patriarchy made the political apparatus of feminism merely one more interest group that had outlived its ideals. That ideal, though, still had life and was still most accurately expressed in the original phrase: Sisterhood is powerful.

Then came Bill Clinton’s pitch-perfect Madonna and whore attitude toward women, updated for the 90s as a distinction between well-educated professional women and less-educated pink-collar women. The former were honestly respected as colleagues; the latter were sexual prey. This update was wildly successful as many well-educated professional women defended Bill against the claims of his “low class” victims. And, of course, at the head of the women in this well-educated professional defense brigade was Hillary. I found them both contemptible.

It was a member of that defense brigade of well-educated professional women that drove the final nail in the coffin of feminism. Molly Ivins went on the Imus show and mocked Gennifer Flowers by making fun of the low-class spelling of her name. To honestly believe Flowers was lying and say so would have been fine. To attack her on a class basis was despicable: if feminism did not mean that women stood together across the divides of class then it meant nothing. I turned to my husband and announced that feminism was now officially dead.

Then came the 2008 Democratic primary and I became one of those women who slowly, grudgingly developed a respect for Hillary Clinton. I suppose there was one earlier sign this could happen. When Hillary ran for Senator in 2000, I saw the portion of the debate where her challenger invaded her personal space. Like many others, I saw his actions as an attempt to intimidate. More important, though, I admired Hillary standing her ground mostly because I knew I would have stepped back. It was one very small “go Hillary” moment but it presaged what would come later.

In the Fall of 2007, however, I was in agony. It looked like the Republicans would nominate someone I simply could not vote for and the Democrats would do the same by nominating Hillary Clinton. Then came Iowa and my reaction was gratitude that the nominee apparently wouldn’t be Clinton and a “good for him” feeling about Obama’s victory. Then came the media’s response and my attitude changed.

The media seemed just a little bit too happy about Hillary’s defeat. Just a little too gleeful. Just a little too sneering. I still didn’t want Hillary as the nominee but I also realized I didn’t want her to go down to ignominious defeat. I didn’t yet articulate this feeling to myself in terms Cokie Roberts would later describe as that sense that here’s an older woman who has worked hard all her life and now some young guy is getting her promotion. I simply wanted Hillary to put up a decent showing. Call it team pride if you will. I couldn’t stand her but she was on my gender team so “go Hillary”.

Then Hillary cried. As I recall the incident, she was campaigning in New Hampshire, sitting at a large table with a group of people, and someone asked her how she was doing because she looked so tired, and she choked up. Instantly I was back in a meeting years ago. I’d been doing my first client installation, getting about 5 hours of sleep a night for what seemed like forever, getting no support from my company, and getting nothing but pressure and grief from the client. I held it together, though, and did my job with a stiff upper lip until I sat in a status meeting and someone said something nice to me. I choked up.

No, I still wasn’t a Hillary fan. But I’d been brought face to face with her honest humanity and that meant the media’s insistence that she had only cried because someone mentioned her appearance or she had cried as a ploy because no one as tough as her could cry honestly struck me as not merely sneering but bordering on vicious. So when Hillary won Iowa I cheered.

And that’s how it went from there. The more the media snarled the more I wanted Hillary to win. It wasn’t reaction to the media, though, it was admiration for Hillary. Again she stood her ground when I know I would have stepped back. For all her endless list of serious faults, this was one tough cookie.

If she had won the nomination, would I have voted for her in November? I honestly don’t know. I do know that sometimes when I look at the two candidates we have I find myself with the sinking feeling that Hillary would be far better than either. When the candidates talk about FISA or energy policy or taxation, I find myself wanting to hear what Hillary would have to say on the issue. And I find myself often missing her grasp of both detail and big picture, her complex humanity, and most of all her grit.