The Dish

My own response to the president's colloquy turns out to be among the more restrained. Ambers is positively ecstatic:

More than the State of the Union — or on top of the State of the Union — this may be a pivotal moment for the future of the presidential agenda on Capitol Hill. (Democrats are loving this. Chris Hayes, the Nation's Washington bureau chief, tweeted that he hadn't liked Obama more since the inauguration.)

During the presidential campaign, it was John McCain who proposed a form of the British Prime Ministers' questions for the president. It was derided as a gimmick. This is no gimmick. I have not seen a better and perhaps more productive political discussion in this country in…a long time. 90 minutes worth!

More importantly, so are some Dems:

The moment President Obama began his address to Republicans in Baltimore today, I began to receive e-mails from Democrats: Here's an except from one of them: " I don't know whether to laugh or cry that it took a f$$@&$* year for Obama to step into the ring and start throwing some verbal blows… I'm definitely praying at mass on Sunday morning that this Obama doesn't take another 12 month vacation."

This e-mail comes from a very influential Democrat.

Ezra Klein is pessimistic in light of Rahm shuffling the agenda:

It is very, very, very important to be clear on what the death of health-care reform looks like. It is not a vote that goes against the Democrats. It is not an admission that the White House has moved on from the subject. It is continued statements of commitment from the key players paired with a continued stretching of the timetable. Like everything else in life, policy initiatives grow old and die, even if people still love them.

So this is Rahm's strategy: keep lying in saying that the Dems are determined to pass health reform, then wait until it dies. If that is the strategy, it is both cowardly and deceptive, and Obama himself is part of the lie, given his SOTU commitment this week.

And if Obama is a liar on this, the core honesty he campaigned on is in peril. To be this weak is one thing. To be this weak and a liar takes it to an all-new level.

The Onion’s dyspeptic obit.

I've just watched the president address the Republican retreat in Baltimore. Address is not quite the right word, because it was a genuine – and remarkable – conversation between Obama and his political opponents – transparently on CSPAN. I don't remember similar public events of this length and this informality and candor in the past, but I may be forgetting some. But the theme was very straightforward: the president does not expect total GOP support on everything he is trying to do; but he does believe that the tactical oppositionism and electioneering that infects our current politics is making it impossible for the republic to grapple with the real and pressing problems we face.

He was especially good on entitlements, the need to reform them – and the impossibility of doing so if every time someone tries to they are hazed for "raising taxes/killing jobs" or "cutting medicine/killing seniors". This applies to both parties, of course. But it has been pretty brutal from the GOP this past year.

But here's the key thing: Obama is best at this. He is best at defusing conflict; he is superb at engaging civilly with his opponents. It's part of his legacy – I remember how many conservatives respected him at the Harvard Law Review. But he needs to do more of this, even though he may get nothing in return. Why? Because unless the tone changes, unless the pure obstructionism and left-right ding-dong cycle stops, we are on a fast track to catastrophe. 

That was the core message of Obama in the election. It was one of my core reasons for backing him over Clinton – because he has the capacity to reach out this way. I remain depressed at the prospects for a breakthrough, but this was good politics and good policy. More, please. Do this every month. Maybe over the long haul, the poison of the past has to be worked through with Obama as therapist in chief.

(Photo: Saul Loeb/Getty.)

Grand Rapids, Michigan, 11 am

Larison, as always, is worth reading:

Republicans have been treating temporary, tactical political victories as if they were far more significant, strategic victories, when, in fact, they have no political strategy worth mentioning. This is how many Republican hawks have approached problems in Iraq and Afghanistan. Especially in Iraq, the strategy has always been unclear, unrealistic or even non-existent, so there is great emphasis on finding tactics that “work” to make a basically incoherent policy seem successful on the surface.

On every single major issue of the day, they are incoherent. They have no workable plans to insure the uninsured and no practical way to contain healthcare costs; most deny climate change even exists; most seek to prolong wars because … er, we have to be tough; their response to the massive debt is to defend Medicare and call for tax cuts; their position on civil rights is that gay people need to go to Jesus; their position on terror suspects is to detain them and torture them, violating domestic and international law; their position on immigration is to round up millions and force them to go home.

My worry, however, is that there are enough Americans perfectly happy to live with this nihilism indefinitely, and to perpetuate the policies of spend-and-borrow and invade-and-occupy that any serious attempt to address our problems is impossible. And their response to that will be to blame all those problems on a Democratic president, if there is one; and if there's a Republican president, to simply deny that any of the problems exist at all.

Rahm says that the White House is going to "try to act first on job creation, reducing the deficit and imposing tighter regulation on banks before returning to the health measure." Drum:

Given the normal pace of congressional action — including the usual Republican obstruction — this would mean no action on healthcare for at least a month or two. Maybe more like three or four. Or maybe never. New pronouncements seem to come almost hourly on this stuff, so I'll wait for a few other folks to chime in before coming to any conclusions. But if healthcare is now domestic priority #4, it might as well be domestic priority #100. It might not quite be dead, but no matter what Obama said in his State of the Union address, the grim reaper is starting to hover uncomfortably close by.

Maybe Suderman is right and I'm still in denial.

But why Rahm Emmanuel, whose job it was to manage the Congress and get health reform passed, is still directing legislative strategy when he has proven he is incompetent at it,  is beyond me. More evidence, I suppose, that in government, rank failure means career success. 

And what's also notable is that Emmanuel's rep is as an attack dog, someone who can really twist elbows and enforce discipline. He has proven to be none of the above – just another useless Democrat excusing failure and losing nerve and incapable of getting his own party to deliver on clear, unequivocal campaign promises.

A reader writes:

I was struck by your reader’s correlation between fantasy and lying. If that is the case, I live a constant lie. Like everyone, I fantasize all the time. I fantasize that I am a striker for Arsenal and am scoring an important goal at Highbury. I fantasize that I can punch Karl Rove in the nose. I read the travel section of the New York Times and fantasize that I am getting on a plane and going to these places. And yes, I fantasize about sex.

Am I lying to myself? I don’t think so. I know very well that I can barely kick a ball, have not hit someone since the second grade, don’t really enjoy air travel, and am pretty sexually satisfied with my wife. But when I am out walking the dog or taking a shower, should I be thinking all the time about Jesus? Who can do that?

This is one of those moments where the Catholic Church demands that we behave in a way that, I believe, is against human nature and is simply not achievable. I do not think God will judge us by the exploits we live in our fantasy life – he will judge us by the acts we performed in our actual life. As long as we are conscious of the difference, I think we will all be fine.

But again, my point is that the new natural law position is that it is more natural never to wank than to do so from time to time, that human beings can see this as a self-evident proposition from observing the world. At the very least, it is not self-evident. At the very most, it is preposterous.

Radio Free Europe reports:

[I]n at least two official ceremonies in recent days, images of that flag have been used where the green color has been replaced by blue. The move has led to speculation that the Iranian government is trying to get rid of the green in the Iranian flag because it's a symbol of the opposition movement that has been challenging the disputed reelection of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

Scott Lucas posts a second, less-ambiguous photo. A Dish reader from Iran adds:

When the below cartoon came out days after the June 12th election, no one would have predicted that it would happen for real…it has literally!  This is almost unbelievable. There were rumors that the Government agencies and state TV were ordered to avoid Green colours as much as possible, but to change the green stripe of the national flag to blue??? That is beyond shocking.

Uwe E. Reinhardt sighs and rebuts Noonan et al.

One would imagine a columnist would be able to grasp some essential and very well-disseminated arguments as to why a stripped down health bill that just protected us from the worst abuses of the system just cannot work; but what matters to Noonan appears to be how she feels at any given moment. What policy reality is – why the Senate bill is about as moderate and sane a plan as any we have on the table – is apparently irrelevant.