Whatever pscyho-b.s. Yglesias want to attribute to anyone, the biggest steaming pile of it comes from Matt himself, who doesn't seem able to differentiate between simply passing something and that something passed actually WORKING in practice.

We can disagree about what he should have passed but we can all agree that passing something in the attempt to please everyone gets you bad policy that we all hate.

Bush did this with some of his policies and it cost him the support of his base which in the long run equals the death of any politician.

Sure, try to win over the other side with your ideals but maybe, just maybe if you can't win the argument or win it enough to pass a large policy it is better to focus on smaller goals then to try and pass some huge boondoggle that nobody with any sense really wants.  

To me that is the major issue with this president.

I'm sure he's smart as the dickens, but when it comes to politics, I've often felt that he needs to buy a clue. The list of policy "achievements" he rattles off include a couple I don't regard as anything worth bragging about, starting with health care "reform" that I don't see so much as an achievement as I do a sell-out which has granted the de facto power of taxation to for-profit corporations and locked us into a badly broken system.

We have an economy in the tank, U6 unemployment at over 16 percent, massive military spending, a state of more or less permanent war (which apparently justifies anything at all), foreclosures continuing at a record pace and an administration that frankly seems oblivious.

Why was the sell-out health care reform deal (which was handled very, very badly) given precedence over jobs, jobs, jobs? Why were contracts for banksters and their bonuses sacrosanct, but contracts for union workers were not? Why the sell-out on negotiating drug prices under Part D? Why the sell-out on re-importation?

Yglesias and some others are patronizing because they think that the rest of us are stupid, and that if we were just as enlightened as they, we'd be happy as clams. The attitude of the 'listers' is something I find offensive.

What the administration actually fails to recognize is that good governance is the benefit that is - or should be - at the heart of all of this, and voting and donating and volunteering are supposed to be in furtherance of the governance we want and need.  We feel good when our efforts give us the results we want - and many of us do not feel like being good sports where our health care system, our financial system, our social safety net, our jobs, our judicial system, our bodies, and our rights to privacy are concerned: it does matter to us when we lose, especially when we lose to powerful corporate interests, or to power itself, and there is little comfort or consolation in our or their having played a good game if what really happened is we lost something important - again.

Yglesias patronizes because Obama does; he can talk down to the liberals, because Obama has no respect for us, or interest in what we want.  How maddening is it that we have legions of self-serving bloggers who have made it their mission to defend Obama policies and "accomplishments" that would have them shrieking mad if they came from Republicans, and that defense is done in a head-patting, condescending way that is "this" close to suggesting that maybe we're so upset because it's, well, that time of the month.