Cross-posted from Blue News Tribune.
"The idea of our Table was that Right was to be the important thing, not Might. Unfortunately, we have tried to establish Right by Might, and you can't do that."
"I don't see why you can't do it."
"I tried to dig a channel for Might, so that it would flow usefully. The idea was that all the people who enjoyed fighting should be headed off, so that that they fought for justice, and I hoped that this would solve the problem. It has not."
"Why not?"
"Simply because we have got justice. We have achieved what we were fighting for, and now we still have the fighters on our hands. Don't you see what has happened? We have run out of things to fight for, so all the fighters of the Table are going to rot. Look at Gawaine and his brothers. While there were still giants and dragons and wicked knights of the old brigade, we could keep them occupied; we could keep them in order. But now that the ends have been achieved, there is nothing for them to use their might on. So they use it on Pellinore and Lamorak and my sister -- God be good to them. The first sign of the fester was when our chivalry turned into Games-Mania -- all that nonsense about who had the best tilting average and so forth."
-- T.H. White, The Once and Future King
It's certainly a noble notion, but this conversation ends with Arthur and Lancelot deciding to find the Holy Grail, and we all know how that worked out.
L'affaire Gregg has been instructive, for me. My dirty little secret throughout the fall campaign was that I was torn over Democrats getting 60 votes. I'm from Massachusetts after all, and one-party rule (even rule by the better party) can be dangerous. But there is a key difference, at the national level: We will never have 60 Democrats with safe seats, so the usual Democratic divides will kick in, and be the antithesis of what we saw for the most of the Bush administration.
What's the upshot of the Gregg nonsense? The president gets another Cabinet embarrassment, John Lynch looks like a wimp (at best), and we still have no Commerce secretary. Great outreach. And still, the question lingers: Why Gregg in the first place? If the answer is bipartisanship, then bipartisanship needs to go back to the drawing board.
Meanwhile, Gregg's absentia dementia enabled GOP obstructionism of the bailout bill. The Republicans in the House forced all sorts of concessions, then all voted against the bill. Will the Democratic caucus learn from this? Do bears build A-frames in the woods?
I have a lot of sympathy for what Obama is trying to do. But the fact remains that the loyal opposition is disloyal, to him. Limbaugh may have been hyperbolic in saying he wanted Obama to "fail," but what they do want, by definition, is political viability, and they can't get that by "rubber stamping" a stimulus bill. The end result is Games-Mania.
So what is a good American, but also a good Democrat, to do?
This is where I should have the answer, but I don't have it.
But I know I have not run out of things to fight for.
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