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There is a conflict.

On the one hand, we have Robert Gibbs, who I like and admire.  He speaks slowly and clearly, and always has just a hint of a smile, as if there is a whole lot more that he is not saying.  He’s pleasant and easy to like.  He’s a lot like his boss, Barack Obama, in that sense.

Of course, that’s his job, to be a public face for Obama, a buffer between him and the rabid dogs of Rupert Murdoch.  So, it’s natural that those who like Obama, like Gibbs.

I still like Barack Obama.  I am disappointed in his failure to prosecute any Republicans for their numerous crimes against humanity and against the U.S. constitution.  I am dismayed that he didn’t fight for a single payer health care plan, and that he failed to rally the Democratic party around the public option or around the medicare buy-in plan.  I am disturbed that he continues to try and deal with Republicans, who will never, ever support him no matter what he does.

But I still, basically, like and admire the guy and his press secretary, too.

Then you have Ed Schultz, who I’d never heard of before.  He is, like Keith Olbermann, a sports commentator turned political pundit.  He was apparently a Republican at one point, who now considers himself a liberal progressive.  It’s nice to see somebody moving in that direction.

Anyway, he recently told Robert Gibbs he was full of shit.  It wasn’t in front of a microphone, it wasn’t on camera, so basically we just have his word for it on the terminology.  Robert Gibbs, as far as we know, doesn’t talk like that.

The argument was over health care, and I have to agree with Schultz.  He says that the current bill is a giveaway to the insurance companies and that what we need is a single player health care.  Socialized medicine.  You get sick, you go see a doctor.  After all, we don’t make our children pay every time they see a teacher.

So, you have Gibbs, who I like, getting a bucketload of shit from Schultz, and I’m on Schultz’s side.

As I say, there is a conflict.

I must confess, when I first read Chris Dodd’s “idea” I thought “there’s some merit to that.”  I put idea in quote marks because it’s not really an idea, it’s like the ideas that I have whenever I smoke a joint, eh, this isn’t working, let’s put it aside for awhile and think about it later.  It’s not so much an idea as an ultimate admission that you don’t have any idea.

It could have some merit if they were actually going to use those 6 weeks to come up with a plan, to lay the groundwork, to come back at the end of 6 weeks and blindside the dinosaurs with something so simple, so straightforward that it would be impossible to oppose.

Medicare for everybody.

European plan.

Canadian plan.

Massachusetts plan.

Same plan as congress has.  Linked.  Simple as that.  The entire bill reads:  Resolved:  Every American citizen shall have access to the congressional health care package.

Something along those lines, and fuck ‘em if they want to filibuster.  Keep hauling people in wheelchairs and hooked up to breathing machines in to testify in front of congress and make the republicans and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson look like the inhuman monsters they really are.  Do that until November of 2010.

A clear majority of the American people want a comprehensive, affordable health care system and if we stomp them in the 2010 elections, which we can if we all stop whining and stabbing Barry in the back. (O.K., he’s not a progressive, but he’s closer to it than any president we’ve had since 1963)

Then I read the comments over at Wonkette and realized that they are probably reading Chris Dodd a lot more accurately than I am and this is what it appears to be.  A complete surrender.

Of course, we should have known that when Reid said that the Senate would wait for Brown to be seated before moving ahead with health care.

So, America is totally screwed.  Take your damned 6 weeks.  I’ll continue to bitch about it pointlessly, and try and figure out alternative solutions.  And wonder.  Is Peggy Noonan secretly a vampire?

I wrote yesterday that American voters are stupid and pointed to Scott Brown as proof.  Now, if anybody was actually reading my blog posts, that might make some of them angry.

Unfortunately, it’s not just angry ranting on my part.  I’m not a hater, even though I sometimes sound like one.  American voters really are painfully, embarrassingly and demonstrably stupid.

I’m not basing this entirely on Jay Leno’s Jaywalking segments.  I’m aware that that is an edited comedy segment and they probably had to spend hours, or at least long minutes, to find people who couldn’t name a country beginning with U, or didn’t know that the language spoken in England was English.

I’m not basing this entirely on the Miss Teen South Carolina contestant who totally lost control of her mind-tongue co-ordination capacity in her answer to the question “Why are Americans so stupid?”

I’m not basing this entirely on the roommate I once had, from New York, who argued with me when I said that his city was an island.  He wasn’t arguing the details, that it’s actually more like an archipelago and also has a small section of the mainland within its borders, he just said I was full of shit, and my two other roommates, air-headed California boys, nodded in agreement.  They were a bunch of assholes but I’m not basing this argument just on them.

I’m not basing this entirely on the fact that creationism (intelligent design) is taught in some schools as if it were science.

I’m not basing this entirely on the fact that very few Americans speak any language other than English.

I’m not basing this on the fact that they show up at protest demonstrations with misspelled signs (Get a brain, morans!)

No, I’m basing my argument mostly on the fact that George W. Bush, who by some definitions of the word would have to be considered mentally retarded, was elected to the presidency twice.  I’m basing this on the fact that Connecticut voters keep returning Joe Lieberman to the Senate, Iowa voters continue to back Charles Grassley, Minnesota voters elected Michelle Bachman (O.K., one district, there may be other areas of MN which are more intelligent than the national average), Illinois voters installed Rod Blagojevich, Alaska voters elected Sarah Palin in a landslide and, of course, Massachusetts voters chose Scott Brown.

And those aren’t even the seriously stupid states.

Well, Scott Brown won and will represent Massachusetts in the United States Senate, replacing the recently deceased Ted Kennedy.  There are many things that we can learn from this election.

1. Americans voters are almost unbelievably stupid.
2. Yes, even in Massachusetts.
3. The Democrats are doing something seriously wrong.

There’s not much we can do about the 1^st two, but the 3^rd one…well, therein lies the problem.  There are two basic theories as to what the Democrats are doing wrong.

Joe Lieberman, quite predictably, says that the Democrats lost because they are too far to the left.  They want to spend too much money and the health care plan was too radical, so nobody likes it.

There is one important thing we should remember about Joe Lieberman.  He is not a Democrat.  He loved George Bush.  Remember the kiss?  He voted for the war in Iraq and for the Patriot Act.  Not reluctantly, not because he was overwhelmed with the zeitgeist, overcome by the angry mood of the crowd.  No, he voted for them enthusiastically.  When it comes to the Middle East, Joe Lieberman represents Israel.  Quite specifically, the Likud party of Israel.  Any attack on any Arabic country is a good thing, to Joe Lieberman.  (He’s ready to go to war with Yemen, any time now)

When he was defeated by Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary, he ran in the general election as an independent –not exactly a party loyalist thing to do – and won, because Republicans ignored their own helpless candidate and crossed over to vote for him.  In the 2008 election, he supported John McCain, even helping Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin prepare for her debates.  Then, he sabotaged health care reform every chance he got, even voting against proposals he himself had proposed.  So, this suggestion that the Democrats are too liberal is coming from Republicans.  It should be not only ignored, but openly mocked.

The other theory is that the Democrats lost because they have not been progressive enough.  They have not prosecuted any members of the Bush administration for war crimes, corruption, violations of the constitution, etc…They took a single payer health plan – which a majority of Americans would like – off the table before negotiations even started.  They have not put any of the big CEOs who caused the financial crisis in jail.

The Democrats could very easily bring the progressives back into their column, grab a large chunk of the independents and put the Republicans on the defensive.

However, I expect they will continue to take it up the butt from Lieberman and his ilk.  That’s just what they do.

Sometimes when things go wrong it’s all right.  A cancellation is a free moment, a gift from the universe of an unexpected block of time.

This morning, I’ve had it both ways.

I dropped my son off at school a bit early because I was supposed to teach a class at 8:30.  I’d never been there before and it’s in a part of town I don’t know really well, so I was a little worried about getting there on time.  Metro to Depo Hostivař, then two stops more on any one of about 6 busses.

I had a beautiful moment of surprise when the train came above ground, as it does at a few extremities of the Prague Metro system, but it’s always an unexpected change, from the blank grayness of the tunnel where your eyes can only focus on the other faces on the train, which are generally set in grim and unpleasant expressions.

Unexpected and sudden. There is still plenty of snow on the ground, even though it’s melting, and we were far from the center of town.  There were skeletons of trees standing in stark, bare fields of white.  Very pretty.

Exiting the station at Depo Hostivař, I was relieved to see that it was 8:06.  Piece of cake.  In this city, public transportation units run about every 2 minutes in rush hour.  I’d have plenty of time to find the place even if I got lost, which frequently happens to me even when equipped with a map and specific directions.

It was 8:25 before the bus came.  So, now I was a bit nervous but still, within 5 or 10 minutes is generally considered on time in this town.  Got to my stop and didn’t get lost, but the slushy sidewalks and parking lot made for slow going.  I got there at a quite respectable 4 minutes late.

The doorman definitely looked like I was unexpected, but he rang up to the guy’s office and…he wasn’t there.  Still at home, he’d forgotten the lesson entirely.

So, I headed for home looking forward to a hot cup of coffee, a good breakfast and a joint.  I was enjoying the beauty of the day, icicles dripping, snowbanks slowly imploding, but still longing for the comfort of the cave.

I called my wife to tell her of my good fortune and two minutes later…she texted me with a little errand in town.  Every empty space in time is soon filled.