(h/t Heather.)

One of the things I learned early on in my journalism career is that words have power. They also have consequences. Fortunately, I have a conscience. I credit my Catholic upbringing for that.

I found so much to admire in the concepts of social justice and compassion with which I was raised, and even though I'm not longer a Catholic, I still take exception to the way these so-called Catholics distort the faith.

It infuriates me when I see people like these distort and twist the truth about healthcare reform - for what reason? I mean, they're pretty much the scrubs of the right wing, a bunch of has-beens and wannabes. Do they do it to feed their egos? To keep the cocktail-party invitations flowing? Let's look at this group of "moral" leaders who are fighting so desperately to save the elderly from socialist liberal euthanasia.

It's mostly older people who watch "The McLaughlin Group," I think, so the antics of these clowns mostly fly below the radar - just like talk radio.

John McLaughlin is the former Jesuit priest who cared so deeply about God, he quit the order rather than give up his speechwriting gig with Richard Nixon.

Pat Buchanan, a good friend of McLaughlin's and the Nixon speechwriter who got him the job, is a product of Jesuit schools and presents himself as a Catholic so conservative, he still goes to the Latin Mass. He has occasional lapses in which he actually tells the truth, but these are so few and far between, it's not worth mentioning. Pat is generally is so willing to distort reality, it's a given. If Pat vehemently tells you the sky is blue, stick your head out the window and check.

Monica Crowley, another Nixon employee, is a Fox News "analyst" - i.e. someone paid to twist and mold the truth into something to inflames passions against Democrats. (By the way, her sister, Dr. Jocelyn Crowley, is married to Hannity's former co-host, Alan Colmes.) Apparently she's pretty good at distorting truth:

Crowley was accused of plagiarism in 1999 for an article she authored titled "The Day Nixon Said Goodbye" that appeared in the The Wall Street Journal. After accusations of plagiarism from at least one reader, an acknowledgement of "striking similarities" between Crowley's article and an article by Paul Johnson titled "In Praise of Richard Nixon" in the October 1988 issue of Commentary Magazine was published. A Journal editor stated, "Had we known of the parallels, we would not have published the article."

Crowley acknowledged the similarity between the pieces, and said "there are clear similarities in the language. I have wracked my brain, and I can honestly tell you that I have not read [Johnson's article]."

An article in Slate Magazine detailed five specific passages in Crowley's article that contained identical language and phraseology to Johnson's piece, and concluded that "it just isn't possible for Crowley not to have read Johnson's article."

There is something called "The Ten Commandments," and Christians generally agree that it's important. John, Pat, Monica and their ilk simply ignore any of those commandments that are politically inconvenient ("Thou shalt not bear false witness") or they apply them selectively ("Thou shalt not kill" only applies to fetuses, and not Iraqi children). They dig out obscure parts of the Old Testament they insist mean Jesus condemned gay people, and yet they still eat shrimp and lobster - condemned in the same book of the Bible.

We already know they will do or say anything that will further their political cause and erode ours.

So spare me the wide eyes and crocodile tears. No one's suggesting we off old people, and they know it. They're just so shameless and cynical, they couldn't resist.

Everyone knows if liberals really believed in killing people when they're no longer productive, people like McLaughlin and Buchanan wouldn't be here.

Helen's right, damn it. And look at Gibbs' deflection: "We've had a pretty good week." Sorry, Gibby, health-care reform is slowly slipping away. Don't just stand there.

Here are my thoughts on what the White House did wrong, in no particular order:

1) Obama outsourced the legislation to Congress instead of presenting it himself and working with them to write the details. He thought he'd outsmart the GOP by doing the opposite of the Clinton plan, but instead the bill is now lost on a sea of "compromise."

2) Bipartisanship. You just can't work with ideologues who refuse to operate in good faith. They're true believers, they will never give an inch. You'd think Obama would have picked up that little lesson while studying the Clinton era.

3) Blue Dogs. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi need to come up with new strategies, since kissing their collective Blue Dog butts only inflates their already-swollen egos. Someone (Obama?) should lay down the law. Put them in the worst offices, cut their staff budgets until they cooperate. Lyndon Johnson wouldn't be holding their hands.

4) Single payer. It would have been so much easier if we'd started with it. Hell, we might even have won - and it's simple enough that most people would understand. But whatever.

5) He should have come out fighting for the public option earlier this year. Instead, he let the opponents (and the insurance companies) define the public perception. BIG rookie mistake.

6) It's one thing to meet with relevant stakeholders (insurance companies, Big Pharma, etc.) It's another thing to trust them. (See Otter, "Animal House": "You f***ed up, you trusted me!")

7) He should have included a public advocate to speak for ordinary people in every healthcare meeting. (Hell, does he even HAVE a public advocate? Because he should. I'm available.)

8 ) Obama is just not good at explaining complicated things to ordinary people, especially when he's not working from a script. He drones on and goes off on tangents. He should use more surrogates, Michelle might have done a better job. Hell, Bo might have done a better job. (I understand the political reasons he didn't ask Bill Clinton, but that may have been a fatal error. The Big Dog would have sold the hell out of the healthcare plan.)

9) The President should have made it clear from the beginning that the main focus of this bill is to make life better for Americans. All that blah blah blah about "bending the cost curve" and "controlling costs" only fed the public paranoia about rationing. (All he had to do was compare the public option to the assigned risk pool for auto insurance, and they would have gotten it.) Yes, in one of his speeches, he talked about how the bill would give everyone security, but when you're selling something, you need to stay on message. He's given us so many reasons why we should support this bill, I can't even remember them all - and I'm actually paying attention!

10) Don't negotiate from the middle, damn it. Ask for the moon and stars, and work your way toward the middle, or risk people thinking you're a corporatist tool. (Ahem.)

Krugman was right again. Instead of taking a strong leadership position and insisting on a larger package, Obama played nice with the so-called "moderates" of both parties (i.e. morons who would sell their own mothers to feed their swollen egos). And here we sit, in a stagnating economy that sinks even deeper in recession as jobs are flushed down the drain.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite business books, "Management by Baseball." Author Jeff Angus (who also has a great blog) says one of the most common management mistakes is when a manager assumes a strategy that has been successful for him as a player will apply to all situations when he's a manager. Obama's built his career on being a cautious incrementalist, but what's called for now is bold vision.

So what's Obama going to do about it? Krugman has some suggestions:

So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.

All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.

So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.

Just to be clear, I’m well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted.

There won’t be any cooperation from Republican leaders, who have settled on a strategy of total opposition, unconstrained by facts or logic. Indeed, these leaders responded to the latest job numbers by proclaiming the failure of the Obama economic plan. That’s ludicrous, of course. The administration warned from the beginning that it would be several quarters before the plan had any major positive effects. But that didn’t stop the chairman of the Republican Study Committee from issuing a statement demanding: “Where are the jobs?”

It’s also not clear whether the administration will get much help from Senate “centrists,” who partially eviscerated the original stimulus plan by demanding cuts in aid to state and local governments — aid that, as we’re now seeing, was desperately needed. I’d like to think that some of these centrists are feeling remorse, but if they are, I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect.

And as an economist, I’d add that many members of my profession are playing a distinctly unhelpful role.

It has been a rude shock to see so many economists with good reputations recycling old fallacies — like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment — and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)

Also, as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms.

So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.

Obama administration economists understand the stakes. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” — the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.

What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.

So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.