GUESS WHICH PARTY IS PRO-SLAVERY IN THIS COMPARISON?

Medicare and the Missouri Compromise (Harold Meyerson, July 10, 2003, Washington Post)

The bills that the House and Senate have sent to the conference committee would legislate two irreconcilable visions of health insurance and the roles of the state and the market. House Republicans, who passed their bill on almost a straight party-line vote, authorized tax subsidies to seniors who choose to opt out of Medicare to join HMOs. Those seniors whom the HMOs don't want -- the sicker ones, with chronic conditions -- will be left behind in Medicare, which will perforce become a more rickety, less sustainable program unable to compete with the private insurers.

The Democrats, by contrast, want to expand Medicare's reach by having it pay for seniors' prescription drugs. In the Senate, led by liberal warhorse Edward Kennedy, most of them voted for a bipartisan bill that did create that benefit, but in a fashion so spotty that it would cover only a quarter of seniors' drug expenses.

Two equal but opposite wagers have been made. Kennedy, noting that every universal benefit the government has created has gradually been expanded to meet the public's demands, is betting that the fragmentary coverage offered by the current bill would grow in time to a comprehensive universal program. His right-wing counterparts, meanwhile, believe that by subsidizing HMOs to pick apart the senior market, they can forestall Medicare's expansion and weaken government's role in health insurance.

Historically, major social legislation in America hasn't emerged from the melding of fundamental differences. Social Security and Medicare were enacted by Democrats who believed in those programs; the Civil Rights Act wasn't written by segregationists. Today, however, the public demand for prescription drug coverage has peaked when Congress is controlled by Republicans opposed to public insurance.

Any bill emerging from conference that includes elements of both visions, then, will not resemble our landmark social legislation. If anything, it will look like the Missouri Compromise -- the 1820 act in which the free states of the North and the slave states of the South tried to work out a formula for expanding their rival societies into the territories west of the Mississippi River.

Harold Meyerson may be a Johnny-One-Note, and that oft-repeated note may be idiotic, but you've got to be awed by his persistence. We've lost track of how many times now he's compared the GOP to the Confederacy, but a few examples from the archives are below. One would hardly know that: (1) the Civil War is over; (2) The Republicans beat the Democrats therein and freed the slaves; (3) it is possible to use other examples when you wish to portray conservatives as hate-filled extremists--how about calling us Nazis just to break the tedium?; and (4) there are some (admittedly slight) differences between a market-oriented prescription drug plan and slavery.


IS HE AWARE OF APPOMATTOX? (Brothers Judd, 7/07/03):
Phobe Home: The Republican Party is still a haven for bigots. (Harold Meyerson, 7/03/03, American Prospect)

Antonin Scalia is raging against the coming of the light.

Scalia's dissent from last week's epochal Supreme Court decision striking down Texas' anti-sodomy statute confirms Ayatollah Antonin's standing as the intellectual leader of the forces arrayed against equality and modernity in the United States. In establishing the deep historical roots of anti-gay sentiment in America, for instance, Scalia took pains to note the 20 prosecutions and four executions for consensual gay sex conducted in colonial times. He noted, approvingly, that even today, "many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools or as boarders in their home."

Actually, back in 1978, a California electorate far more conservative than today's massively repudiated an initiative seeking to ban gays from teaching school, but this inconvenient fact -- and other evidence of a massive shift in public sentiment on gay rights -- doesn't have quite the legal majesty of those four colonial executions. (Scalia is uncharacteristically short on detail here. Were they hangings or burnings?) Scalia's justifications for discriminatory conduct sound terribly familiar. Change "homosexual" to "Negro" and Scalia is at one with the authors of Plessy v. Ferguson's mandate for "separate but equal" schools, and the judges who upheld anti-miscegenation statutes. Indeed, of the 13 states whose anti-sodomy statutes were struck down last Thursday, 10 were once slave states of the South. In what has always been the main event in American history -- the battle to expand the definition of "men" in Jefferson's mighty line on who's created equal -- these are the states that have had to be dragged along kicking and screaming.

Just as surely as the cock crows the dawn, Harold Meyerson compares conservatives to the Confederates.

FOOL THEM ONCE... (Brothers Judd, 4/21/03):
The Most Dangerous President Ever: How and why George W. Bush undermines American security (Harold Meyerson, 5.1.03, The American Prospect)

[W]here, in the panoply of American presidents, do we situate Bush? He's not the first president to try to reconstruct the economic order. But the president who really attempted a general fix -- Franklin Roosevelt -- did so because the old order was plainly collapsing. No such situation exists today. Worse yet, what Bush is proposing is to erect a new economy by giving more power to the shakiest element -- the private-sector safety net -- of the old.

Just over a century ago, William McKinley set America on the course of acquiring a colonial empire, setting off a debate over America's proper role in the world every bit as impassioned as the one raging today. McKinley's path was a radical departure from past practice, but the United States was still a second-tier power. The shift did not destabilize the world. A half-century before that, James Polk plunged us into war with Mexico over considerable northern-state opposition (including, in the later phases of the war, that of Congressman Abraham Lincoln), but at that point, America was a third-tier power.

The three presidents who sought to build a multilateral framework for international affairs were Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Wilson's plan was killed in its crib when Congress refused to ratify our entry into the League of Nations. Roosevelt's and Truman's contributions -- setting up a structure of international law, bringing prosperity and freedom to Western Europe, cementing alliances with other democracies, containing and eventually defeating Soviet communism -- are the enduring triumphs of U.S. foreign policy. Bush seems bent on destroying Roosevelt's and Truman's handiwork, however, and substituting a far more grandiose version of Polk's and McKinley's, in what is distinctly a postcolonial world. As with his assault on Roosevelt's New Deal order, he professes to replace an architecture that may be flawed but certainly isn't broken -- in this case, with an empire not likely to be backed up by the consent of the governed.

None of these presidents, great or awful, seems quite comparable to Bush the Younger. There is another, however, who comes to mind. He, too, had a relentlessly regional perspective, and a clear sense of estrangement from that part of America that did not support him. He was not much impressed with the claims of wage labor. His values were militaristic. He had dreams of building an empire at gunpoint. And he was willing to tear up the larger political order, which had worked reasonably well for about 60 years, to advance his factional cause. The American president -- though not of the United States -- whom George W. Bush most nearly resembles is the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis.

Yes, I know: Bush is no racist, and certainly no proponent of slavery. He is not grotesque; he is merely disgraceful. But, as with Davis, obtaining Bush's defeat is an urgent matter of national security -- and national honor.

Our thanks to Mr. Meyerson for clearing up last week's controversy over the assertion that he'd compared George W. Bush to Nathan Bedford Forrest because of Forrest's association with the KKK rather than his military prowess.

DOES ANYBODY EDIT THE POST? (Brothers Judd, 4/10/03):
Preemptive Peace (Harold Meyerson, April 8, 2003, Washington Post)

From the folks who brought us preemptive war, here comes preemptive peace.

The Defense Department intellectuals who have emerged as the dominant force in U.S. foreign policy had it all mapped out. While the debate raged over whether to go to war in Iraq, they dispatched a couple of hundred thousand troops to the region, establishing a fact on the ground that ultimately made the war unstoppable. Now, while the debate is just beginning over the nature of the interim government in postwar Iraq, they have dispatched a postwar government of their choosing to the Kuwait Hilton.

With the assistance of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, George W. Bush has emerged as an apt pupil of Nathan Bedford Forrest. In war and now in peace, he gets there first with the most men. Deployment precedes -- and damn near obviates -- debate.

The comparison of President Bush to the founder of the Ku Klux Klan is fairly standard for the Left these days, which has no coherent arguments to make, only epithets to sling, but surely the Post has some standards about what they allow even mere opinion writers to call people, no? One of Forrest's successors, David Duke, sides with Mr. Meyerson as regards the war, but in what way does that knowledge and implicit tarring advance the political dialogue? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 11, 2003 11:48 AM