Yes, the healthcare legislation still does not require Members of Congress to be part of the public plan, option, call it what you will, only poor sucker citizens. Those Congressmen are no fools. They know government-run medicine hasn’t worked in Canada and the UK. You think they want their wives lining up for a mammograms?

Here are some interesting tidbits that have been pointed out to me on my current brief visit to DC:

Ways and Means Committee – Rep. Heller (R-NV) offered an amendment to require all (”exchange eligible”) Members of Congress and their families to get insurance through the government-run plan. It failed, by a vote of 18-21, with three Democrats supporting the amendment: Berkley, Davis (AL), and Yarmuth. You can read all about it on p. 518 of this interminable document. (Who says PJM isn’t a full-service media company?) When a similar amendment was offered at the Energy and Commerce markup, it was dismissed by chairman Henry Waxman as “nongermane.” That’s my Congressman, of course. No comment necessary.

Over at the Rules Committee several amendments were filed on this subject, but ultimately not permitted under their rules. Rep. Sessions moved to make an order and provide the necessary waivers for amendment #1 offered by Reps. Fleming (R-LA), Wilson (R-SC), Gingrey (R-GA), and Herger (R-CA), which would automatically enroll all Members of Congress and all Senators in the public option. His motion was defeated on a party line vote of 4-6, with the following Members absent: Slaughter, Matsui, Pingree.

There’s more passed on to me by PJM’s “undercover correspondent,” but you get the point. It’s pretty depressing. You won’t read about this nonsense in the MSM, of course, but we’re going to try to deliver more on PJTV and the pages of Pajamas Media. That’s why I’ve been in Washington the past few days, helping to set up a team to do some investigating. The results won’t be immediately evident, but as we move into the new year, I hope you’ll see more of it.

Speaking of depressed, I don’t think I’ve even seen the nation’s capital in such a genuinely depressed mood. In my job, I have made multiple visits in recent years, but the atmosphere now is almost unnerving. No one seems to really like this healthcare legislation (how can you like what you couldn’t possibly read?). People just care about enacting or defeating it. The level of discussion is nihil; there is no discussion. Cap-and-trade, Afghanistan, everything is in a weird stasis. Some Republicans gloat that the administration seems to be imploding – and perhaps they are right – but there should be a cautionary note in all this. Imploding seems to be the natural state of this city. A party arrives in victory and months later they are in shambles. What’s astonishing about the Obama crew, however, is that they arrived on the wings of untold optimism supported by almost the entire media and still they have plummeted to near nothing in less than a year. Scary.

Game, set, match, tournament. But, hey, it’s only the Dean of Harvard Med. What would he know compared to such great clinicians as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi? This would be magnificent black comedy were it not our lives and – more importantly – those of our children that were hanging in the balance. The rush to enact this self-serving legislation is pretty much the most disgraceful US governmental act of my lifetime – at least that I can think of at the moment – and, as readers know, I am no longer in my twenties (!).

Here’s another memorable sentence from Dr. Flier: “Ultimately, our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all.”

How’s that, Mr.Obama? That’s the word from your alma mater. Mean anything? Probably not. It’s all politics all the time to you and your crew. Shame on you.

Perhaps it’s his independent status, but where freedom of thought is called for, usually it’s Lieberman who is the first to step forward. Most recently we have seen this in two key areas – healthcare and the controversy surrounding the actions of Nidal Hasan.

Regarding healthcare, Joe Lieberman holds within his hands the ability to block a piece of legislation that could be disastrous for our country, a bill constructed out of the most blatant partisan know-nothingism. Of course, his enemies will cry that his opposition stems from the presence of insurance companies in his state, but I think we all know that Joe Lieberman is well beyond that at this point – and not just because he is 67 but because of who he is. From Bloomberg:

Donald W. Greenberg, associate professor of politics at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut, said Democrats need Lieberman a lot more than he needs them.

“He feels now that he’s secure,” Greenberg said in an interview. “His history has always been as a social liberal. There are lots of issues where he might bolt the party, but you wouldn’t think this is the one. I do think he believes sincerely that this is very dangerous for the economy.”

Believes sincerely? How’s that for a member of the US Congress, moving about in the world of the Murthas, Rangels, Reids and Dodds, who probably don’t believe sincerely that they put on their own socks in the morning?

And who was the first up to call for a congressional investigation of the Ft. Hood disaster? Joe Lieberman, of course. Were we surprised? Again of course, not. Not any longer. Lieberman knew immediately that the most important problem to emerge from that tragedy was to understand as completely as we could why a man like Dr. Hasan could have been allowed to serve in our military.

When you think about it, it’s amazing how much we need Joe Lieberman at this point in our history.

If this short piece sounds like a campaign speech, well, in a way it is. Coming back to my lede, I mentioned how I used to have mixed feelings about Joe Lieberman, how he ran a flat Presidential campaign. (He wasn’t particularly scintillating as a Vice-Presidential candidate either.) But maybe that’s the point. Maybe what’s called for in a great political campaigner – the ability to lie and exaggerate to attract the masses – is precisely what is NOT called for in a great political leader – honesty and courage.

I will ask you one final question. Who would you rather see in the presidency today at this time of financial and international crisis, Barack Obama or Joe Lieberman?

But, Jekyll and Hyde, he can also be the most traditional sort of hack pol imaginable and right now – at the very moment he is aiming to reclaim the governorship of the Golden State – he seems to have brought a situation upon himself that could make the famed Medfly Scandal seem like so many gnats at a horse show.

He has made the mistake of tangling – consciously or not – with Andrew Breitbart. Worse yet – over ACORN.

What we know so far: Some bozo named David Lagstein – ACORN’s chief organizer for the San Diego area – made the dim bulb mistake of speaking out loud to a group of Democrats at the very public venue of a Coco’s Restaurant in El Cajon. Someone recorded his statements, including such doozies as Brown is a “political animal” and will find the fault to be “with the people that did the video — not ACORN.” And so forth. For those who don’t know, Brown, as California Attorney General, is supposedly conducting an investigation of ACORN prompted by the videos, which originally appeared on Breitbart’s site. These latest recordings are also available on Big Government. I encourage you to listen, if you haven’t.

On top of this, there is a complication for Brown in the attempt to “kill the messengers” (i. e. blame the clandestine videographers) for the bad news here. One of the Attorney General’s own spokesmen has just been accused himself of secretly recording interviews with journalists. But no matter. Even if this were not true, the attempt to blame the videographers is pathetic, since they didn’t for a second make up the horrifying revelations about ACORN available on who knows how many videos about the organization. ACORN and its personnel did that to themselves. Apparently the Attorney General was already questioned about this growing scandal on the radio, but avoided answering. (I didn’t hear it.)

So, hello Jerry Brown. History knocks. Who are you? Are you a man of courage able to think out of the box? Or a party hack? Surely, you of all people understand that organizations like ACORN, even leaving aside their potential enabling of child prostitution, are far more destructive than helpful to the people they are supposed to aid. They are part of the problem, as we used to say, not part of the solution. What are you going to do, Jerry? Who are you going to be? The citizens (and voters) of California are waiting.

Of course there’s this, so who knows?

The passing of the baton from Dunn to Pfeiffer had long been expected within White House circles as she had made clear when she took the job that the “interim” in her title was meant to be taken literally.

Hard to tell if that’s real or spin or, more probably, both, but Cillizza’s report also contains this eye-opening tidbit:

Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff and former Illinois Congressman, has made clear he would like to return to elected office at some point in the not-too-distant future and, if past presidencies are any guide there will be some further turnover in the senior staff over the next year or so.

Rahm Emanuel? The man who exhorted his colleagues never to miss the opportunities offered by a good crisis? Is he the next to go? Have we begun the night of the long Obama knives?

Anyway Lionel and I will review those of interest to us on Poliwood – the first being Woody Allen’s “Whatever Works,” starring Larry David as Woody – the aging playing the aged. Anyway, Woody’s fantasy that you can be attractive to twenty-year olds at seventy goes on. Lionel and I have fun with it here. And we have some other comments about DAvid and Allen as well. Speaking of the aged, old Poliwoods are here.

On Sunday, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) called for an investigation into whether the Army missed signs as to whether Hasan was an Islamic extremist.

“If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have a zero tolerance,” Lieberman told Fox News Sunday.

Zero minus one, I should think. Meanwhile, what did the CIA know and why didn’t they tell the military of Hasan’s efforts to contact al Qaeda (or did they?):

One senior lawmaker said the CIA had, so far, refused to brief the intelligence committees on what, if any, knowledge they had about Hasan’s efforts.

CIA director Leon Panetta and the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, have been asked by Congress “to preserve” all documents and intelligence files that relate to Hasan, according to the lawmaker.

Whoa. My post of Friday night is proving more accurate than I would have liked.

Of course, the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Usama bin Laden and various other mass murderers of recent history. Nevertheless, the attempt was to explain away Hasan’s actions as pathological and thus avoid dealing with, or even – to the degree possible – mentioning the ideology to which his neuroses adhere (hint: it begins with an “I”).

This strategy is a form of what is popularly known as political correctness, which I submit is also a pathology and a quite virulent one – in this case, arguably the cause of death of the thirteen men and women murdered at Fort Hood.

As a reminder, political correctness is derived from the more intellectually respectable doctrine of cultural relativism (it’s sort of CR’s public “happy face”). In essence, cultural relativism holds that an individual’s beliefs and activities should only be understood in terms of his or her own culture. It’s the ultimate version of “who are we to the judge?” If Ayatollah Khomeini wishes to oppress all the women and homosexuals in Iran, it’s their way. If Mao seeks to knock off seventy million of his countrymen, so be it. Let the Chinese decide. We shouldn’t impose our values.

On our increasingly tiny globe, this theory – when spelled out – is nothing short of preposterous. It fairly invites a return to the mass murdering ideologies of the Twentieth Century – Nazism, communism, etc – and opens the door wide for Islamism.

Even so, its “happy face” partner political correctness continues to permeate our culture and our media. And, alas, as we are now painfully aware, it has infected our military – badly. How else to explain that Nidal Hassan was passed through the Army system for years despite making numerous public pronouncements that sounded as if they were ripped from the pages of an al Qaeda training manual?

This sad infection of our military is the most disturbing and self-destructive achievement of political correctness yet. Still, cable television spends hours trying to probe the “motivations” of Hasan, as if a Muslim bumper sticker torn from his car could explain his actions or even (oh, hope) exonerate him. That way we would not have to deal with the ideology behind him and, more importantly, not have to confront our own pathology.

But that pathology of political correctness has now been laid bare before us. More than the two handguns, it was the murder weapon in that room at Fort Hood. Those thirteen innocent people are indeed PC deaths because it was PC that allowed Hasan to be there. The question is, as it is with all emotionally loaded learning, what will we do with this new information?

To begin with, we must explore what attracted us to political correctness in the first place. Several explanations suggest themselves: political expediency, increased power in certain quarters, the desire to be left alone, the desire to be loved, even psychosexual masochism. There are more, I am sure. But they must be ventilated. Nothing can bring back the thirteen who were killed. But the most fitting memorial to them would be that their murders would signal the death knell of political correctness.