Howard Fineman

Shame on You, Mr. Fineman
A one-act musical written after discovering that Howard Fineman, Newsweek’s Chief Political Correspondent, Senior Editor, and Deputy Washington Bureau Chief, had shamelessly stolen from my Unfit story from Sept. 28, “UNFIT for an Uncomplicated Strategy” (in which I postulate that Barack Obama is employing a rope-a-dope strategy to win the debate over health care reform), for his MSNBC editorial from Oct. 7, “Obama Channels Ali in Health Care Prize Fight” (in which he postulates that Barack Obama is employing a rope-a-dope strategy to win the debate over health care reform).

(Scene: A small cluttered home office in Austin, Texas. A YOUNG MAN sits at his desk, staring at a photograph of Howard Fineman. His mouth is open, his eyes are filled with tears, the palms of his hands are turned heavenward in a pose of infinite pain and disappointment. He has no pants on. On the wall behind him hangs a poster with the words “Ethics of Journalism” written in enormous type.  A MALE CHORUS sits around him, wearing fedoras and trench coats. They each hold a pad of paper in one hand and a pencil in the other. A slow dirge plays in the background, like something you’d hear at Yom Kippur services.)

YOUNG MAN (Speaking to the photograph): I can’t believe you did this to me. After all those hours I spent listening to you talk about the Iraq War. Fineman!

MALE CHORUS (Chanting soberly): Fineman! Fineman! Fineman!

YOUNG MAN: After I defended your position on the political viability of a public option to my friends. Like a fool! Fineman!

MALE CHORUS (Still chanting soberly): Fineman! Fineman! Fineman!

YOUNG MAN (Getting more agitated): After all that time I devoted to reading your damn columns. How could you do this to me? Fineman!

MALE CHORUS (Their chanting becomes more excitable with each word, as the music starts to build in intensity, volume, and rhythm): Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman!

YOUNG MAN (Jumping to his feet and clutching the photo to his chest, he lets out a mighty wail): Oh, Fiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnemaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnn!!!!!

(The music transforms into an uptempo jaunt, complete with tambourines and trumpets. The YOUNG MAN leaps onto his desk. The MALE CHORUS jump from their chairs and gather around him, pencils and pads out, as if taking notes at a news conference. Ripping the photo to shreds and throwing them around the room like confetti, the YOUNG MAN begins to sing)

“I’m Indignant!”

YOUNG MAN:

Oh, Fineman!

MALE CHORUS:

Fineman!

YOUNG MAN:

Though your name rings out at MSNBC
As a man of ethical pedigree,
With your degree in Journalism from Columbia,
Still I’ll tell everyone from here to Northumbria
About your sinister reportorial calumny.
You stole from me!

MALE CHORUS:

You stole from him, you really did,
Oh, Mr. Fineman!

YOUNG MAN:

I am just a simple sort of man
I try to write the best I can
Then you come along with your Newsweek magazine
And distort my theory with your glossy sheen
Stealing from Unfit … what kind of man?!
You stole from me!

MALE CHORUS:

Stop, thief! Stop, thief! Stop, thief!
Oh, Mr. Fineman, you devil, you!

YOUNG MAN:

First I wrote, “Obama rope-a-dopes”
Then you replied, “Obama rope-a-dopes”
Then I wrote, “Health care’s on the way”
And you type, “Should be here any day”
You stole from me!
I’m indignant! Indignant, I say! And I demand satisfaction!

MALE CHORUS (Bending over and putting their hands on their knees, they whisper repeatedly to the music, which is more subdued now.):

He’s indignant. Indignant. And he demands satisfaction.
He’s indignant. Indignant. And he demands satisfaction.

YOUNG MAN (Turning to his computer, he reads from the screen): Look at this here: I wrote, “Now any Republicans who continued screaming and shouting about the danger the president’s health care plan posed to America’s social fabric would come off looking petty: They would be representatives of the ‘party of no,’ disagreeing just to be disagreeable in a time when insurance premiums kept rising, more and more Americans were losing their coverage, and the economy was sinking deeper into the tank.” And then you wrote, “The GOP and the Blue Dogs risk being accused of mere obstructionism on what everyone agrees — after listening to all the talk in recent months — is a deadly serious social and fiscal problem.” (He throws his hands in the air and shakes them like a preacher at an old-time revival church) Indignant!

MALE CHORUS: (Doing the same): Indignant!

(While the MALE CHORUS continues their chanting, the YOUNG MAN returns to reading aloud.)

YOUNG MAN: Let’s see, let’s see. Ahh, here we go: “Then you sit back and let people get used to the good that can come from government involvement in the health care industry – the reduced premiums, the fixed prices, the guaranteed coverage. ” That’s me. Now you: “But the drawn out process also has underscored the depth and seriousness of the problem. Few now would dispute the basic idea that we are spending too much money for not enough good, sensible health care.” (Hands in the air) Indignant!

MALE CHORUS (Throwing their hands up): Indignant! (They resume their chant.)

YOUNG MAN: Okay, let’s see. Right, right, right. Not that. Ahh, yes. (Clearing his throat like an orator) Me: “Now you have to get some version of health care reform passed (not a perfect bill, of course, but one that speaks to the issues you find most pressing), finding common ground among Democrats both left and centrist while leaving Republicans out in the wilderness, now both blindly contrarian and powerless.” And, once more, Mr. Fineman: “Turning the enterprise over to Congress has made for an agonizing process, but I get the sense that his Republican enemies and Blue Dog doubters may be on the verge of punching themselves out.” Indignant, I say!!!!

MALE CHORUS (Jumping up and down like the newly converted): Indignant!

(The music grows even more intense, still rhythmic but now vaguely atonal and primordial, like the climax of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” The YOUNG MAN points to a chalkboard on which are written the words “My Revenge.” He sings and kicks his legs furiously while the MALE CHORUS freezes in a tableau of fear and amazement.)

“Vengeance”

YOUNG MAN (Singing):

Here, sir, is what I plan to do
To exact my sweet revenge on you:
First things first, go to your house,
Find your laptop, grab your mouse,
With fervent animosity
Search your browser history
Prove that you’ve been to my site,
Vindication! Sweet delight!
Then put back on my shoes and socks
And take that laptop straight to Fox
Just in time for Hannity’s show.
And then, my friend, the world will know
That Fineman is a plagiarist
A stinkin’, low-down copyist,
Who read my piece and liked it so
He thought the whole wide world should know,
But better, he thought, to come from he
‘Cause no one’s ever heard of me.
Ha! Ha! Ha!

MALE CHORUS:

Ha! Ha! Ha!

(The YOUNG MAN considers for a moment.)

YOUNG MAN:

Then again, that may be true.
Who’s heard my name? Not you or you?
I mean, who am I to say what’s right?
This might drive traffic to my site.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Howard Fineman, steal away!
We’ve got new stories everyday.
“When you get too drunk to write
Visit Unfit Times. We’ll treat you right!”

(The YOUNG MAN and the MALE CHORUS spin wildly about the room, arms interlocked, as the music turns into a swinging, lewd burlesque number with crashing cymbals and wailing trombones. 15 VOLUPTUOUS FEMALE DANCERS come dancing onstage in a line, waving fans and winking suggestively to the audience. Balloons fall from the rafters. As the music climaxes, a nude HOWARD FINEMAN appears from offstage with a notebook in his hand to run around the stage copying from the notebooks of the MALE CHORUS.)

ALL (Singing):

Steal your stories here at Unfit Times!!!

(Exeunt.)

Man with a plan?

I remember reading an interview with Kevin Smith back in 1997 in which the trench-coat-wearing writer/director/Miramax poster boy admitted that his third film, Chasing Amy, which was getting a lot of positive critical attention at the time, was actually intended to be his second. Figuring there was bound to be backlash against him after the enormous success of his first, no-budget feature, Clerks, Smith decided that, rather than let a film he felt was actually worth something get unfairly torn apart by jealousy and bad press, better to send out a sacrificial lamb to take the hit – in this case, a movie he didn’t care too much about and that no one would ever mistake for a good film that had gotten a bad rap.

And hence Mallrats.

Well, with apologies to anyone who takes politics and high-minded social criticism seriously, I have come to the conclusion that President Obama is taking a similar tack with the public health care option.

I figure it this way: Obama had to know when he got elected that whatever goodwill he enjoyed during his first few months in office would eventually dry up. He and his advisors were sharp enough to realize that his high early poll numbers were soft and that, in our overheated political climate, eventually the Republican Party would figure out a way to go on the attack and knock him back down to Earth.

They also knew that the relative ease Obama had experienced in passing the financial bail-out bill in February was a honeymoon victory resulting from those high poll numbers and a desperate economic environment in which any strong action would be looked on positively by an American public driven to disbelief by Bush’s detachment.

They also knew that when it came time for the president to call his second big play, the Republicans would waiting in the tall grass for him.

So rather than put health care reform on the table straight and risk getting into an ugly dog-fight over issues he thought were vital (like lower premiums and guaranteed coverage), Obama put the public option out into the world as a sacrifice, a big piece of Democratic red-meat, with a slight tang of socialism, that he knew would drive the Right crazy and give them something to focus their vitriol on.

Then, just when things seemed to be getting irretrievably dark (like, say, early September, after a full month of town hall nonsense), Obama put the word out that he was willing to reach across the aisle. By doing this, he suddenly appeared munificent and bi-partisan in an environment of extreme ideological toxicity, willing to do whatever it took to get a bill passed. Now any Republicans who continued screaming and shouting about the danger the president’s health care plan posed to America’s social fabric would come off looking petty: They would be representatives of the “party of no,” disagreeing just to be disagreeable in a time when insurance premiums kept rising, more and more Americans were losing their coverage, and the economy was sinking deeper into the tank.

My friend Eliot Tretter, doctor of geography and apparent closet boxing fan, calls this approach the “rope-a-dope”: Obama lays back during the summer and lets the Right Wing have their effigy-burning, name-calling, Hitler-referencing fun, and then, just when it looks like the Democrats are getting their heads handed to them, he swoops in with a compromise only a mindless ideologue could truly hate. Suddenly health-care reform looks alive again, naysaying Republicans no longer look like the principled opposition party but a bunch of intransigent cranks, and the president comes off looking like a bipartisan rationalist.

So now what? Now that you’ve given a couple of speeches and gone on all the Sunday news programs and Late Night With David Letterman and told the American people what your plan is really all about?

Now you have to get some version of health care reform passed (not a perfect bill, of course, but one that speaks to the issues you find most pressing), finding common ground among Democrats both left and centrist while leaving Republicans out in the wilderness, now both blindly contrarian and powerless.

Then you sit back and let people get used to the good that can come from government involvement in the health care industry – the reduced premiums, the fixed prices, the guaranteed coverage. Never underestimate the American public’s capacity to change its ideological tune when it experiences firsthand the benefits of a policy they were once skeptical of.

Remember, when social security was being debated in the 1930s, opponents swore up and down that anyone supporting it was a socialist. Same with Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. And now look: Social Security has become the great untouchable in American politics (just ask George Bush and the Republicans about the virtues of privatization); meanwhile Medicare – that shining example of government-run “socialized” medicine – is so sacred that even right-wing town hall crazies carry signs demanding the government stay out of it (and without a hint of irony, too).

(Medicaid, of course, is slightly less sacred to Americans because it benefits only the poor, and if there’s one thing the Right is good at, it’s screaming about the need for a national Christian morality while totally missing the point of Christianity.)

If this all happens, then you’ve built up enough political capital and public goodwill that maybe the voters will trust you and your party enough to keep you in power come 2010 and 2012, whether because of the good you did or the nothing the other side did. And then – after you’ve been re-elected and after you’ve established yourself and after the American people have grown accustomed to the idea of government involvement in health care and seen what it can do for them – then you spring the public option on them. Because by that point you will have softened them up to the idea. It’s a perfect demonstration of the old adage that politics is the art of the possible, achieved in increments.

If this is all true, if Obama really is “rope-a-doping,” and if he manages to pull it off, then he very well may be a political genius, a thinking-man’s leader so patient he’s willing to bide his time (through one of the darker, more intellectually demeaning months in American history, no less) and suffer all kinds of indignities in order to get what he feels is best for the country. But if it’s not true, then Obama is stuck in neutral, a man both without a cause and without a plan. A moral and political lightweight.

And if that’s the case, then Eliot Tretter Ph.D. and I are the only political geniuses around. Us and the Republicans. And God help this country if that proves to be true.

Setting for a national crisis

As you read this, there is a writer somewhere in America deleting an essay about how best to improve our education system while maintaining federal solvency; a journalist has tucked an editorial that solves the problem of Palestinian sovereignity into a desk drawer; and yet another collection of rhyming couplets about genocide in Darfur, the consequences of global warming, and the dangers of adjustable rate mortgages goes unread, exposing more innocent people around the world to violence, privation, and long, confusing telephone conversations with bank representatives.

I know this to be true because that writer is me, that desk drawer is mine, and I rhymed those couplets myself.

Count me as one more victim of America’s health care crisis.

We’ve all heard the horror stories from the front lines of our national insurance debate: citizens who woke up one morning to find their premiums had been raised during the night, patients who learned that their coverage had been terminated because of a disease some insurance company decided was too costly to fight, good Americans who discovered that no insurance company would cover them because of a pre-existing condition, family members struggling to pay rising stacks of medical bills.

But there is a group of Americans whose stories have gone untold, whose struggles we never hear about. They are the silent victims of the health care crisis. I’m talking about writers. And now is the time to speak up for them.

Since that first crazy old lady stood up in that town hall meeting in early August to declare that President Obama wasn’t a real American, writers like me have had to spend all our time writing about health care, shelving other, equally important pieces in the name of satisfying the editorial desires of an uncharacteristically focused American public. We’ve written stories about White House political tactics, right-wing demagogues and their followers, the weak knees of the Democratic party, the strong knees of the Republican party, the conservative approach to civil disobedience, and on and on and on. Process stories, political stories, personal stories, op-eds, satires, single-panel cartoons: You name it; we’ve written it. When we wanted to write about gay marriage, we were told to write about health care. When we wanted to examine inconsistencies in the president’s position on enhanced interrogation techniques, we were told to write about health care. Every idea we’ve had over the last two months has been swallowed whole.

Writers are the unseen, unheard victims of the American health care disaster. True, we might not have cancer or AIDS or even diabetes, we may not be bankrupt or homeless, but we do know what it’s like to sit at a computer for hours at a time trying to come up with new ways of making fun of people who believe death panels really exist. And it’s starting to take a toll. Every day, reports come in of yet another political writer somewhere who is seriously considering giving up journalism altogether and going back to school. Is that really what this country needs right now? More graduate students?

Of course not.

Please help us: Call your congressman or senator today and tell them you want health care reform passed so that our journalists can get back to writing about congressional sex scandals and you can get back to reading about the season finale of True Blood.

Your writers will thank you for it.

So much for a quiet August in Washington.

Traditionally the time of year when Senators and Congressmen return to their home districts for a month to catch their breath, escape the swampy heat of D.C., and feign erotic interest in their spouses while quietly dreaming of their paramours back in Georgetown or Foggy Bottom or even Tenleytown, August this year has turned out to be louder and more stressful than Capitol Hill on voting day. The debates over health care, the daily confrontations at town hall meetings, the rabble-rousing of the media’s lunatic-fringe, and the patriots with thigh-holsters have conspired to turn what should have been a sleepy summer into one of the more disheartening eras in American democracy since Republican preppies tried to turn the Miami Elections Office into a frat house after a home loss.

As depressing as the last few weeks of political uh, debate, have been, what’s really sad is that the right-wing approach – trumped-up grass-roots mobs shouting down whomever they disagree with – appears to be working. Late last week, Democratic officials admitted that end-of-life counseling reimbursements in the House bill would probably have to go, a concession to the absurd allegations from right-wing demagogues like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich that the sessions would be little more than “death panels” run by big-government bureaucrats granted the power by Barack Obama to decide who lives and who dies in America.

Then on Sunday, newspapers started reporting that Obama was considering dropping the bill’s “public option,” long coveted by liberal Democrats convinced that government involvement in health care is the only way to guarantee coverage for every American. Hemming and hawing and parsing his words like a true modern-day Abe Lincoln, Obama claimed at a town-hall-style meeting in Grand Junction, Colorado, that “[t]he public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”

Wait. Didn’t we win the White House in 2008? Didn’t Obama run on a platform of hope and change and a belief in the positive role government should play in American life? And didn’t he come into office as the leader of a party with control of the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate? So what in the world is he doing listening to the demands of the psychotic fringe of the Republican Party, much less giving in to them? Shouldn’t he just stick them in a corner and forget about them for the next three and half years while passing the laws he wants passed?

Well, unfortunately he can’t, for the simple reason that it isn’t the Republicans he has to worry about. Just ask Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Back in 2006 it was Emanuel who decided that the best way for the Democratic party to reclaim majorities in Congress would be to sacrifice core values in the name of appealing to the vast political center. Looking to win at all costs (not such a bad idea at the time, considering we were coming up on year seven on an unfettered Bush administration), Emanuel recruited dozens of moderate Blue Dog Democrats – many of whom were pro-life, pro-business, and pro-gun – to knock off the ultra-conservative Republicans who had finally started creeping out the average American voter. Figuring even moderate Democrats were better than Republicans, Emanuel (along with Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Harry Reid) sold out his party’s philosophy in the name of securing his party’s dominance.

In other words, that filibuster-proof majority is really nothing of the kind, Al Franken or no Al Franken.

Because in return for selling our souls we got “Democrats” like Mike Ross of Arkansas, a man whose main priority in the health care debate isn’t making sure  that every American is covered or that insurance companies can’t turn down people based on pre-existing conditions, but rather that the plan be deficit-neutral. That’s it. Deficit-neutral. Oh, and that it not provide health care for illegal immigrants or funding for abortions. In other words, we got a Republican. A Republican from 1992 maybe, but still a Republican.

Serves us right. We liberals wanted so desperately to hand Bush and his crew a defeat in 2006, we checked our ideals at the door and supported anyone with a “D” next to his or her name. Pro-corporation? Anti-immigration? Pro-life? Anti-environment? Who cares; come on in! Anything to pad our numbers and make everyone feel good about themselves. Only now that little Faustian bargain is biting us in the ass – a part of the body, it turns out, not covered by any insurance company.

So when Representative Ross of Arkansas spits out a piece of pandering, insidious, reprehensible, irresponsible, shameful, vacuous nonsense like “I will never vote for a bill to kill old people. Period” (how very brave, Mr. Ross, to come out in favor of old-people), like he did this past weekend, we on the left have to pretend we didn’t hear him. We expect this kind of bullshit from Republicans – Obama’s plan will force euthanasia on the elderly and haul retarded babies into work camps? Who here was honestly surprised to hear Sarah Palin say that? – but from a Democrat? Really? Was that devil’s bargain really so costly that we have to count Mike Ross as one of our own? That the success of Obama’s health plan, not to mention the rest of his agenda, is in the hands of moral and intellectual half-men?

What is with this country? Why is this stuff even up for debate? Why are we listening to these people claiming death panels and Nazi chemotherapy rationing? And why are we humoring the low-lifes who believe what they say? How much respect do we have to have for differing opinions if those opinions are built entirely out of lies? At what point, in other words, do you cross the line from debate into lunacy?

Obama may claim to be a populist, but he must be looking at all those Glen Beck fans regurgitating lies in the streets all over this ridiculous land of ours and just dying to drop a giant blanket over all of them. And well he should. Volatile debate is necessary to a democracy and should be welcomed. And god knows health care is a complicated enough issue to support many different, even opposing, opinions. What doesn’t need to be welcomed, however, is willful ignorance, barely shrouded racism, implied threats, and sheep-like obedience to liars and fear-mongers. It’s time for Obama to step up to the bully pulpit and let the world know that a bold new age of American intelligence is at hand, that this country will no longer be held hostage by any nitwit who comes along with a gripe and a big megaphone.

From now on, only very special nitwits will get that honor.