The final tragic death of Ted Kennedy

Ok, here goes:

You will here this a lot tonight: it will be the ultimate irony if to see the senator occupying Ted Kennedy’s seat cast the vote that defeats health care reform.

Democrats are getting a wakeup call. Unfortunately it might be from Leon from “Blade Runner.”

John Dean is wrong—the only way to get health care reform is not to start over. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have had a plan in place for this contingency for days now. I don’t know what it is yet. It might be as simple as not seating Scott Brown until after they vote. It might be simply passing the Senate version unaltered. But they cannot not pass something. If they do they will lose both houses and probably the White House. And the Republicans know it.

Hey, dummies! You can’t take any state, any vote, for granted!

Dean is also wrong about the cause of this defeat. It is not because the health bill is not strong enough. But Dean is right about the other half of this. This is because the democrats are not strong. They are weak. They are sand in your ace pushovers. They are the geeky weak kid who gets bullied by the frat boys. Frat boys are nearly always republicans.

Obama needs to be more Reganesque and less Carteresque. Really.

Hubris brought low: Obama campaigned for Coakley. He campaigned for Corzine. He campaigned for Chicago to get the Olympics. He failed on all fronts. The president has no coattails.

Let’s face it, people are mad. That is why Barbra Coakley lost. And for some reason they are blaming the people brought in to fix this mess, not the yahoos who caused it in the first place. I mean, how can you support the Republicans to fix anything, let alone their two wars, their economic crisis, their national debt, their mess?

Dean is right. Democrats need to get tough. They need unleash Rahm Emanuel and start attacking. They need to redefine the debate. They need to shift to the left. The problem with the Democrats is that they are more decent than Republicans. President Obama wants to treat republicans with respect, to work with him, and the Republicans want to burn the nation around down his Alfred E. Newman ears.

The conservative movement is on a roll. They have seized the country and they control the debate. Sarah Palin will be the next Republican nominee. The democrats may well loose the house this fall. They could even lose the senate. If they don’t wake up they will be as dead as they pronounced the Republicans just a year ago. Remember that? Remember how the republicans were going to be wandering through the wilderness for the next twenty years after they got so soundly trounced just fifteen months ago? Guess what: political cycles are shortened in the internet age. The years the Republicans spent searching for Ronald Regan have been reduced to basically a summer. That’s all it took to seize control of the debate again. Yes, they do it with lies and deception and unadulterated bullshit—but that stuff works.

So Democrats, in the words of a great philosopher, nut up or shut up.