There are so many things wrong with this very short clip from this Friday's Morning Joe on MSNBC, it's hard to know where to begin, but let's start with the fact that there is no equivalence whatsoever between George W. Bush wanting to privatize Social Security and the Democrats who were against that policy, and the type of obstruction we've seen from Republicans against the Affordable Care Act.
That didn't stop Chuck Todd from playing the Villagers' favorite game of trying to both downplay just how truly horrid the presidency of George W. Bush was, right along side doing his best to downplay just how unprecedented and completely hypocritical the obstruction we've seen from Republicans has been against "Obamacare."
Here's the idiocy that passes for political dialog we were treated to this Friday:
SCARBOROUGH: Second terms are horrible, it seems. You've got to go through this stretch. How is this White House handling it?
TODD: Well, I think, look, they had the added degree of difficulty. I mean, it's very similar watching the health care implementation, where, something where you have an entire political party doing everything they can, in many ways to stop it or point out every flaw, it is probably very similar to '05 and Social Security and where you had an entire Democratic party doing everything they could to make sure that President Bush couldn't get off the ground with that.
So I think there are some similarities. There's something about a second term where you do feel like you want to do the big things and the bigger you try, the more the other side, so frustrated by losing to you twice, even triples down in trying to stop you. That's what you underestimate is the opposition.
Sorry Chuck, but Democrats weren't opposed to privatizing Social Security because Bush won a second term or because they hated Bush. They, like the American public that grew more and more opposed to the policy the longer Bush talked, were against it because it is and was bad policy.
In stark contrast to what happened back then, Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act is completely hypocritical because it was their stinking ideas in the first place that finally got passed that came out of the Heritage Foundation, Bob Dole's plan to counter Hillary-care, and Mitt Romney's health care plan when he was governor.
We didn't get progressive policies passed on health care. We got Republican policies passed because it was probably the best we were going to get with the corrupt Congress we were dealing with if anything was going to pass at all The liberal community on the left didn't like it, but we were willing to see how this played out because it is at least a step in the right direction from what we had.
No one on the Democratic side of the aisle was willing to burn the place down when we didn't get everything we wanted as we've seen the Republicans, who were more than willing to do just that with taking the country on the edge of an economic collapse -- and the pundits in the media like Todd and his ilk have been doing their best to erase that hostage taking and the economic damage it did to our country from our memory banks from the moment it finally ended.
I'm quite sure Todd knows exactly what game he's playing here. He's never going to admit that we've got one party completely off the rails these days without trying desperately to find some equally terrible straw man on the left that doesn't exist.