Massachusetts: Referendum On Ineptitude

January 20, 2010

Representative Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), still wearing the blinders Democrats seem not to be able to shed, declared that insofar as concerns with the health care bill factored into Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts Senatorial election last night, it was because "the people of Massachusetts were . . . upset about provisions in the Senate bill."

Not a word to indicate that anyone in Congress or the administration recognizes that the so-called Louisiana Purchase — the $300 million pledged to Mary Landrieu's state in exchange for her health care vote — is coming to resemble the Lusitania Purchase. And no seeming acknowledgment that the special payoff to Ben Nelson — aka the Nebraska Fiaska — in exchange for his vote might be viewed as unseemly by the broader American electorate, even as Nelson tries desperately to give the money back in the wake of his plunging approval ratings among the state's voters.

Still, with the Democrat ship of state going down, Barack Obama appears ready to double down. Rumblings out of the White House indicate the President is ready to get feisty with it. And Howard Dean, always spoiling for a stupid fight, concurs, noting, with the blindered candor that has come to characterize Dems' calling card of late, that current health care legislation is simply too watered down to make any meaningful impact. By "meaningful impact" it is assumed he means "drive the U.S. several trillion dollars deeper into debt and cement this administration's reputation as the most fiscally irresponsible one in history."

Of course, Dems seem to be unaware that Americans are also more than a bit perturbed by the fact that no one, certainly not Dems themselves, knows what the hell is in the health care package they've been wrangling about for lo these past seven months or so. And no Democrat seems to this moment to understand that Americans are serious in their opposition to unfettered Federal spending and further uninvited intrusion into the decisions that rightfully belong to them and not to their elected federal officials.

The Massachusetts election was more than merely a referendum on Obama's health care agenda. Brown himself said that when Coakley made her "no terrorists in Afghanistan" gaffe, he and his staff realized that terrorism was still on the minds of many Americans. Democrats still are unable to admit that there have been two terrorist attacks on the United States in just the past few months. While Major Hasan's terrorism resulted in 13 deaths, the tighty-whitey bomber, fortunately, failed to detonate his explosive device. The Christmas Day incident came on the heels of the disturbing late Christmas Eve vote to approve the Senate health care bill, and both events occurred while the President was vacationing in Hawaii and, for all practical purposes, incommunicado. When you realize that the current administration can't even keep party crashers out of the White House, let alone terrorists off of our airliners and military bases, you begin to get a sense of what Americans are up in arms about. And when you parse the administration's inability to mount even a coherent and timely response to these very real — and in one tragic event, deadly — threats, you realize that the Massachusetts election was a referendum on ineptude.