The Wall Street Journal bitterly sums up.

And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.

Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world’s greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new “manager’s amendment” that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what’s in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.

Even in World War I there was a Christmas truce.

The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that “reform” has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state. An increasing roll of leaders in health care and business are looking on aghast at a bill that is so large and convoluted that no one can truly understand it, as Finance Chairman Max Baucus admitted on the floor last week. The only goal is to ram it into law while the political window is still open, and clean up the mess later. …

“After a nearly century-long struggle we are on the cusp of making health-care reform a reality in the United States of America,” Mr. Obama said on Saturday. He’s forced to claim the mandate of “history” because he can’t claim the mandate of voters. Some 51% of the public is now opposed, according to National Journal’s composite of all health polling. The more people know about ObamaCare, the more unpopular it becomes.

The tragedy is that Mr. Obama inherited a consensus that the health-care status quo needs serious reform, and a popular President might have crafted a durable compromise that blended the best ideas from both parties. A more honest and more thoughtful approach might have even done some good. But as Mr. Obama suggested, the Democratic old guard sees this plan as the culmination of 20th-century liberalism.

So instead we have this vast expansion of federal control. Never in our memory has so unpopular a bill been on the verge of passing Congress, never has social and economic legislation of this magnitude been forced through on a purely partisan vote, and never has a party exhibited more sheer political willfulness that is reckless even for Washington or had more warning about the consequences of its actions.

These 60 Democrats are creating a future of epic increases in spending, taxes and command-and-control regulation, in which bureaucracy trumps innovation and transfer payments are more important than private investment and individual decisions. In short, the Obama Democrats have chosen change nobody believes in—outside of themselves—and when it passes America will be paying for it for decades to come.

Read the whole thing.

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Last week, Kimberley Strassel explained that democrats will pay a major price for this, but the democrat leadership doesn’t care.

Barack Obama emerged from his meeting with Senate Democrats this week to claim Congress was on the “precipice” of something historic. Believe him. The president is demanding his party unilaterally enact one of the most unpopular and complex pieces of social legislation in history. In the process, he may be sacrificing Democrats’ chances at creating a sustainable majority.

Slowly, slowly, the Democratic health agenda is turning into a political suicide pact. Congressional members have been dragged along by momentum, by threat, by bribe, but mostly by the White House’s siren song that it would be worse to not pass a bill than it would be to pass one. If that ever were true, it is not today.

Public opinion on ObamaCare is at a low ebb. This week’s NBC-WSJ poll: A mere 32% of Americans think it a “good” idea. The Washington Post: Only 35% of independents support it—down 10 points in a month. Resurgent Republic recently queried Americans over the age of 55, aka Those Most Likely to Vote In a Midterm Election. Sixty-one percent believe ObamaCare will increase their health costs; 68% believe it will increase the deficit; 76% believe it will raise their taxes.

Democrats also have managed to alienate the liberal base to which they were catering. The death of the public option and Medicare buy-in this week sent Howard Dean to thundering “kill the bill.” A week from now, the current polls might look good.

Yet it is in individual states where the disconnect between the White House’s soothing words and the ugly political reality is most stark. While Democrats are under fire for the economy and spending, it is health care that has voters thinking it’s time for political change. …

[W]hy the stubborn insistence on passing health reform? Think big. The liberal wing of the party—the Barney Franks, the David Obeys—are focused beyond November 2010, to the long-term political prize. They want a health-care program that inevitably leads to a value-added tax and a permanent welfare state. Big government then becomes fact, and another Ronald Reagan becomes impossible. See Continental Europe.

The entitlement crazes of the 1930s and 1960s also caused a backlash, but liberal Democrats know the programs of those periods survived. They are more than happy to sacrifice a few Blue Dogs, a Blanche Lincoln, a Michael Bennet, if they can expand government so that in the long run it benefits the party of government.

What’s extraordinary is that more Democrats have not wised up to the fact that they are being used as pawns in this larger liberal game. Maybe Mr. Obama will see a bump in the polls if health care passes; maybe not. What is certain is that this vote is becoming one that many in his party will not survive.

Read the whole thing.

Mark Steyn observes:

You can’t even dignify this squalid racket as bribery: If I try to buy a cop, I have to use my own money. But, when Harry Reid buys a senator, he uses my money, too. It doesn’t “border on immoral”: It drives straight through the frontier post and heads for the dark heartland of immoral.

Michelle Malkin has a two-part democrat bribe list.

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Dana Milbank describes how partisan things got on the Senate floor.

At 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon — nine hours before the 1 a.m. vote that would effectively clinch the legislation’s passage — Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) went to the Senate floor to propose a prayer. “What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight,” he said. “That’s what they ought to pray.”

It was difficult to escape the conclusion that Coburn was referring to the 92-year-old, wheelchair-bound Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) who has been in and out of hospitals and lay at home ailing. It would not be easy for Byrd to get out of bed in the wee hours with deep snow on the ground and ice on the roads — but without his vote, Democrats wouldn’t have the 60 they needed. …

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) had just delivered an overwrought jeremiad comparing the Republicans to Nazis on Kristallnacht, lynch mobs of the South, and bloodthirsty crowds of the French Revolution.

“Too many colleagues are embarked on a desperate, no-holds-barred mission of propaganda, obstruction and fear,” he said. “History cautions us of the excesses to which these malignant, vindictive passions can ultimately lead. Tumbrils have rolled through taunting crowds. Broken glass has sparkled in darkened streets. Strange fruit has hung from southern trees.” Assuming the role of Old Testament prophet, Whitehouse promised a “day of judgment” and a “day of reckoning” for Republicans. …

[Senator Coburn] who led the effort last week to stall proceedings by forcing an hours-long reading of legislative language, … lobbed a grenade onto the floor when he said that, because of the legislation, Medicare recipients are “going to die sooner.”

On Saturday, Coburn likened the current situation to the period preceding the Civil War. “The crisis of confidence in this country is now at an apex that has not seen in over 150 years, and that lack of confidence undermines the ability of legitimate governance,” he said. “There’s a lot of people out there today who…will say, ‘I give up on my government,’ and rightly so.”

Frozen Hell: Senator Ugolino gnawing on the skull of Senator Ruggieri

The late Dorothy Parker reputedly answered her telephone with the phrase, “What fresh hell is this?”

In the Age of Obama, Americans in general can greet any news from Washington with the same alarmed interrogative.

Michael Goodwin celebrates Harry Reid’s purchase of his 60th vote (using our tax dollars) by repenting for his vote last year.

President Obama, for whom I voted because I believed he was the best choice available, is a profound disappointment. I now regard his campaign as a sly bait-and-switch operation, promising one thing and delivering another. Shame on me.

Equally surprising, he has become an insufferable bore. The grace notes and charm have vanished, with peevishness and petty spite his default emotions. His rhetorical gifts now serve his loathsome habit of fear-mongering.

“Time is running out,” he says, over and again. He said it on health care, on the stimulus, in Copenhagen, on Iran.

Instead of provoking thought and inspiring ideas, the man hailed for his Ivy League nuance insists we stop thinking and do what he says. Now.

His assertion we will go bankrupt unless Congress immediately adopts the health monstrosity marks a new low. …

It is a myth the fight is over health care at all. It is a vulgar power dispute between liberals and extreme liberals, with health care a convenient portal for command-and-control of 17 percent of the economy.

It’s definitely not reform.

Notice how little Obama talks about sick people or medicine or suffering or any of the realities of illness and death. There is almost no mention of the moral dimension that supposedly animates the demand for universal coverage.

The public intuitively understands the con, which is why it prefers the flawed status quo. Voters tell pollsters by as much as 3-to-1 they think a federal takeover will cost them and the country more money and will produce more red tape instead of better care.

Yet, because power corrupts, and one-party rule corrupts absolutely, dissenters are considered heretics. Until the next election.

Meanwhile, Mother Nature delivered her verdict with yesterday’s blizzard in Washington. I am cheered by the thought that finally, hell has frozen over.

Read the whole thing.

Publius, at Big Government, sums it up.

We’ll be blunt. The ‘health care reform’ legislation under consideration in the Senate is the most corrupt piece of legislation in our nation’s history. …

Exhibit A is the outright bribe extracted by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Corn Huckster State) from Sen. Harry Reid. As a result of Nelson’s performance in his role of Hamlet in the health care deliberations, we will have two health care systems in this country; one for Nebraska and one for the other 49 states.

In its quixotic attempt to ensure everyone has health insurance, the Reid legislation greatly expands Medicaid eligibility. Because Medicaid is a program whose costs are split between the federal and state governments, this expansion in eligibility raise costs dramatically for states. States will be forced to either raise taxes or cut other services to accommodate the forced increase in Medicaid spending.

Unless that state is Nebraska.

And then quoting the bill:

The legislation would maintain and put into effect a number of procedures that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time. Under current law and under the proposal, payment rates for physicians’ services in Medicare would be reduced by about 21 percent in 2010 and then decline further in subsequent years.

(Hey, American Medical Association, how’s that endorsement of this bill working for you?)

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Extreme Left blogger Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake has her own socialize-American-health-care-now organization, called Public Option Please which recently had an art contest.

The winning entry (above, by Amy Martin), was a vivid expression of Statism, which Mark Kirokorian accurately describes: Washington is pictured as the heart of nation, where tired, oxygen-depleted blood is replenished and returned to the hinterland. It’s a perfect illustration of the worldview of the Left.

The image of the Heart of the Nation lit conservative fuses, and Gregory, at Moonbattery, posted the below Photoshopped rejoinder.

Hat tip to Will Wilson.

The New York Times describes the desperate efforts of White House courtiers and advisors to prevent full-scale revolt. They failed.

In the great health care debate of 2009, President Obama has cast himself as a cold-eyed pragmatist, willing to compromise in exchange for votes. Now ideology — an uprising on the Democratic left — is smacking the pragmatic president in the face.

Stung by the intense White House effort to court the votes of moderate holdouts like Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, liberals are signaling that they have compromised enough. Grass-roots groups are balking, liberal commentators are becoming more critical of the president, some unions are threatening to withhold support and Howard Dean, the former Democratic Party chief, is urging the Senate to kill its health bill.

The White House scrambled Thursday to tamp down the revolt, which has been simmering for weeks but boiled over when the Senate Democratic leadership, bowing to Mr. Lieberman, scrapped language allowing people as young as 55 to buy into Medicare.

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Pass this “heinous mandate” at your peril, Senators, warns Keith Olbermann.

1:36 video

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The Kos says remove the mandate or kill the billl.

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In the New Republic, Ed Kilgore warns that Barack Obama has achieved the perfect political storm, a tactical convergence between the left and the right in opposition to his policies.

(O)n a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can’t both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.

Large Tub of Kool Aid, Jonestown, Guyana, 1978

Bryon York wonders aloud why Congressional democrats continue to pursue efforts to ram through a health care bill with aggregated poll numbers showing a 53-to-38% negative public approval. They must realize that they are going to pay a price at the polls in 2010, so why are they so bent upon political suicide?

I put the question to a Democratic strategist who asked to remain anonymous. Yes, Democrats certainly understand that voters don’t like the current bills, he told me, and they are fully aware they will probably pay a price next year. But they have found a way to view going ahead anyway as the logical thing to do, at least in their eyes.

You have to look at the issue from three different Democratic perspectives: the House of Representatives, the White House and the Senate.

“In the House, the view of [California Rep. Henry] Waxman and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi is that we’ve waited two generations to get health care passed, and the 20 or 40 members of Congress who are going to lose their seats as a result are transitional players at best,” he said. “This is something the party has wanted since Franklin Roosevelt.” In this view, losses are just the price of doing something great and historic. (The strategist also noted that it’s easy for Waxman and Pelosi to say that, since they come from safely liberal districts.)

“At the White House, the picture is slightly different,” he continued. “Their view is, ‘We’re all in on this, totally committed, and we don’t have to run for re-election next year. There will never be a better time to do it than now.'”

“And in the Senate, they look at the most vulnerable Democrats — like [Christopher] Dodd and [Majority Leader Harry] Reid — and say those vulnerabilities will probably not change whether health care reform passes or fails. So in that view, if they pass reform, Democrats will lose the same number of seats they were going to lose before.”

All those scenarios have a certain logic (even if the Senate calculation undercounts the number of potentially vulnerable Democrats). But each scenario is premised on passing an unpopular bill that hurts the party. Even if there’s a strategic rationale for doing it, why are Democrats dead-set on hurting themselves?

“Because they think they know what’s best for the public,” the strategist said. “They think the facts are being distorted and the public’s being told a story that is not entirely true, and that they are in Congress to be leaders. And they are going to make the decision because Goddammit, it’s good for the public.”

Of course, going forward has turned out to be harder than many Democrats thought. And now, with various proposals lying wrecked along the road, the true believers are practicing what the strategist calls “principled damage control.”

But still, does it make sense? In the end, perhaps the most compelling explanation for Democratic behavior is that they are simply in too deep to do anything else. “Once you’ve gone this far, what is the cost of failure?” asks the strategist.

At that point — Republicans will love this — he compared congressional Democrats with robbers who have passed the point of no return in deciding to hold up a bank. Whatever they do, they’re guilty of something. “They’re in the bank, they’ve got their guns out. They can run outside with no money, or they can stick it out, go through the gunfight, and get away with the money.”

That’s it. Democrats are all in. They’re going through with it. Even if it kills them.

Conservatives are mean-spirited, while liberals are nice, warm and fuzzy, we’re always being told.

Except I’ve noticed personally that, when they don’t get their way, or when somebody actually dares to disagree with them, liberals can be not very nice at all.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut is the most recent victim of liberal wrath for standing in the way of Obamacare by his opposition to Medicare expansion.

Ezra Klein is a herbivorous California liberal who wouldn’t threaten a jihadi with a caterpillar to save Los Angeles, but come between Ezra and the bright socialist tomorrow, and watch out!

Ezra Klein yesterday practically accused Lieberman of genocide.

Lieberman was invited to participate in the process that led to the Medicare buy-in. His opposition would have killed it before liberals invested in the idea. Instead, he skipped the meetings and is forcing liberals to give up yet another compromise. Each time he does that, he increases the chances of the bill’s failure that much more. And if there’s a policy rationale here, it’s not apparent to me, or to others who’ve interviewed him. At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.

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FireDogLake’s Petition demanding Mrs. Lieberman be fired

The left is not stopping with attacking Joe Lieberman himself this time.

Hollywood producer Jane Hamsher, proprietress of the far left blog FireDogLake, is going after Senator Liberman’s wife Hadassah, running a petition urging the Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer foundation to fire Mrs. Lieberman from her post of Global Ambassador.

According to Comrade Hamsher, Mrs. Lieberman’s earlier career as a lobbyist, in which she represented pharmaceutical and insurance companies, should disqualify her from representing an organization opposing cancer, since her former professional ties might prevent her from entering wholeheartedly into the revolutionary struggle between corporations and consumers.

Besides, Hamsher charges, Mrs. Lieberman and her husband are working on the same side, the side of the evil capitalist oppressors. Hadassah Lieberman must be punished.

3:06 video

Big Hollywood jokes:

What’s the difference between the Mafia and a Hollywood Leftist? …the Mafia doesn’t go after your family.

Back in April of 2007, when Newt Gingrich was still being looked upon as a potential candidate in the upcoming presidential contest, during a debate with John Kerry, Gingrich climbed on board the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) bandwagon and even endorsed carbon regulation.

Distancing himself from AGW-skeptic Senator James Inhofe at the time, Gingrich said:

“My message I think is that the evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon-loading of the atmosphere.”

And then proceeded to propose that the rest of the Conservative Movement should follow his own example by knuckling under to a popular delusion and developing a so-called “green conservatism.”

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Campaigning over the weekend though in Illinois’ 14th Congressional District for Ethan Hastert, the son of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, it sounded like Gingrich has jumped back onto the right side of the fence on AGW. Gingrich said:

“Copenhagen in its current form is a fraud by the left around the world to take power away from people and give it to government and bureaucrats and is a combined effort by the bureaucrats and the academics to take power away from free people and turn them over to the international organization, and it is going to be a disaster. And we should be committed to not implementing Copenhagen [global warming treaty] in its current form under any circumstances.”

Gingrich was back in good form as well on Health Care Reform, advising democrats in danger of losing their seats that voting with Harry Reid may not be worth it.

“If the left manages to drive through a bill which is opposed by 65 percent of the country on health care, our commitment should be simple — when we get a majority, we’re repealing the whole thing. And I want every Democrat who is about to sacrifice their seat for socialized medicine to understand: after you lose your seat, you’re going to lose the socialized medicine too.”

1:36 video

Do Americans want Health Care Reform? Not the way democrats are “reforming” it.

Hat tip to Megan McArdle.

Publius responds to a satirical proposal by Jeff Perren contending that, if government has a responsibility to provide health care to those unable to get it on their own, why shouldn’t government also provide sex for the hopelessly disadvantaged romantically? by pointing out that, in the Netherlands, they’ve already thought of that one.