Too much tail wagging

In the wake of health care defeat, a couple of movies come to mind. I can’t do any linking so I hope the reader may have seen both.

One is The Sting, from way back. I would urge Democrats to see that movie if only to learn about false agents. People can be very smart – so smart in fact that they can hire other people to pose as things they are not. The various roles played by Obama, Lieberman, Baucus, Nelson, and at the end, Michael Bennet, ought to be examined.

Remember when the Senate parliamentarian said that the insurance rates oversight panel had to be ditched? Turns out that all that needed to be done was for the President of the Senate, Joe Biden, to overule the parliamentarian. Funny it didn’t happen.

But the thing I remember most about The Sting was that, in the end, the “mark” could not know he had been stung. Otherwise he might seek revenge.

Democrats do not realize they have been stung, and so will repeat this pattern again. So it is important now for them to feel victory. They really have to believe they did something meaningful.

The other movie is less popular, kind of a “dog whistle” movie where you either realized that it was not far from reality, as I did, or just thought if was goofy entertainment. It was called Wag the Dog. There the lesson of The Sting was even more emphatic. Dustin Hoffman’s character was so impressed with himself and the work he had done in selling a phony war in Albania that he was going to talk in public about it even though he had been warned not to. They had to kill him.

The sting has to stick. If Democrats question authority or realize they were led like sheep to a predetermined destination, they might rebel.

Fat chance, I suppose. But next year, when the tax cuts are on the table, and party leadership starts the whole song and dance all over again, wouldn’t be nice to think that they actually learned from defeat?