Last Call Plus

What the hell is Ezra Klein talking about?

Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum are chewing over the hefty bipartisan support Bush got for his various domestic initiatives. The roll call is impressive: No Child Left Behind, the 2001 tax cut, the post-9/11 war resolution, Sarbanes-Oxley, McCain-Feingold, the Iraq war resolution, the 2003 tax cut, the Medicare prescription drug bill and the bankruptcy bill.

To make a bit of a heretical point, most of those cases prove that Bush's domestic agenda was a capitulation to liberalism, not that Democrats were spineless wimps. NCLB and the Medicare prescription drug bill were both longtime Democratic ideas. The problem with NCLB was implementation, and while the problem with Medicare Part D was that its design was a giveaway to drug companies, it was also hundreds and hundreds of billions funneled towards the largest expansions of Medicare since the program's creation. Health-care reform, in particular, would likely be impossible if the prescription drug benefit hadn't been accomplished. There'd be no way to add that money to the bottom line of the bill and pay for everything. Democrats owe Bush a debt of gratitude for tossing that onto the deficit.

No Ezra, this actually proves three things:

1. The Overton Window is far to the right in hindsight that Dubya's country club moderate Republicanism douchebaggery counts as liberalism these days.  That's a problem both with the Village and with the Democratic party's lack of progressiveness as a whole.  Just because Bush bankrupted the nation by spending trillions we didn't have doesn't make it liberalism, it makes it stupid.
   
2. Democrats are still spineless wimps.  They're even dumber that they thought Dubya was going to share credit with them.  If anything, the Wingers blame the Democrats for all the things Ezra listed (and Bush too.)
   
3. Ezra's been staring into the abyss a wee bit too long, not only is it staring back, it's writing posts for him.