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Krugman Spanks Milbank

By jrosenhouse on December 13, 2010.

Here's Dana Milbank making stuff up in The Washington Post:

This is a hopeful sign that Obama has learned the lessons of the health-care debate, when he acceded too easily to the wishes of Hill Democrats, allowing them to slow the legislation and engage in a protracted debate on the public option. Months of delay gave Republicans time to make their case against “socialism” and prevented action on more pressing issues, such as job creation. Democrats paid for that with 63 seats.

Here's Paul Krugman rightly calling him out:

Um, that's not what happened -- and I followed the health care process closely. The debate over the public option wasn't what slowed the legislation. What did it was the many months Obama waited while Max Baucus tried to get bipartisan support, only to see the Republicans keep moving the goalposts; only when the White House finally concluded that Republican “moderates” weren't negotiating in good faith did the thing finally get moving.

So look at how the Village constructs its mythology. The real story, of pretend moderates stalling action by pretending to be persuadable, has been rewritten as a story of how those DF hippies got in the way, until the centrists saved the day.

We are all Fox News now...

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Democrats paid for that with 63 seats.

I thought it was the new John Malkovich movie. It was released in October. Ernest Borgnine played "Henry the records keeper", and a few weeks shortly thereafter the Democrats lost 63 seats. Gotta be a connection...

Ernest Borgnine is still alive???

Millions of years ago, the ancestors of homo sapiens lived (probably) in the savannahs of Africa. Life there was difficult, with dangers lurking everywhere and obtaining sufficient nourishment a constant battle. The margin for error was slim, and there was rarely time for careful experimentation or reason. Those proto-humans who compulsively modified their behavior whenever things were going bad -- regardless of whether they were really sure of a valid connection between the behavior and the perceived consequences -- were able to escape death more often than their peers who were more likely to "stay the course", to find out for sure which behaviors were truly harmful. Those who survived produced more offspring... and over countless millennia, their descendants developed a strong tendency to respond to negative stimuli by searching for a change -- any change, no matter how disconnected it might be from the stimuli they were trying to avoid.

Democrats paid for that with 63 seats.