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Do a quick Google image search on the name Scott Brown and the results are particularly revealing. Absent descriptive phrases like Senator-elect or savior, Google unveils nearly three full rows of photos featuring Celtic midfielder Scott Brown celebrating some victory or another.
One — only one — image of newly elected Republican Sen. Scott Brown appears and only then halfway through row three. There, staring back at Google users sits the first Republican to occupy a Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat since 1972. Dressed in a nondescript suit and tie, Mr. Brown smiles pleasantly enough, his reputation for GQ looks certainly confirmed.
Include either the word ‘savior’ or ‘cosmo’ in your search, however, and watch the real fun begin as images of Senator-elect Brown, the political superstar of the moment, appear on screen.
Choose your row and the now-familiar image of Scott Brown posing nude for the June 1982 Cosmopolitan centerfold as their first contest winner for “America’s Sexiest Man” — Brown was a Boston College law student at the time — appears en masse, followed by a single image of Brown delivering a speech in full military dress appear.
Leave it to Democrats to pave the golden brick road for Scott Brown to drive his GMC Canyon onward to victory in last Tuesday’s special election.
Should the Democratic Party, led by President Obama, fail to deliver real, substantial health care reform in the next few weeks, they will only have themselves to blame.
For their part, the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party — led by Fox News, Glenn Beck and other irrational folk on the right — has done their damndest to prove to the rest of us that Comrade Obama intends on leading the country down the perilous path of socialism, fascism, death panels, and the like.
Had the Democrats had the courage of their convictions or the audacity to level with increasingly angry and frustrated Americans, they might have used their large majorities in the House and Senate and their control of the White House to explain to the American people the precise definition of socialism and radicalism.
The current Obama agenda is neither.
What, for instance, might have happened last year if Congressional Democrats held a press conference at the start of the health care debate detailing the various options on the table for Americans? What if Democrats had defined a single-payer system as such, explaining its socialist underpinnings and why such a program might be a good fit for Americans?
Then what, just what, would happen if Obama came out and explained precisely why he believed that such a system would not work in the United States, why it was an imperative to our belief in a free market system to create some sort of hybrid system?
Sure, the Republicans would have attacked the initial single-payer idea as socialism, but at least then they’d be telling the truth instead of lying their conservative hearts out with tales of death panels and scaring my 65-year-old mother.
Then, maybe, just maybe, some folk on the political right might have taken the conversation on health care more seriously. Those folk would sit down with progressives to stake out a responsible and respectable center on health care reform, something universal and fiscally sound.
As it stands, the right relied on hysteria and rhetoric — their usual strategy — to convince voters that a watered-down public option was akin to socialism.
And now the sexiest man in America heads to Washington, hoping to undo healthcare reform just as a majority of Massachusetts voters told exit pollsters that they sent Brown to D.C. to work with Obama on real reform, not kill it as the absurd Teabag Movement hopes he will.
Time will tell whether the Democrats’ timidity costs them control of the House in the midterms later this year.
In the interim, Washington D.C. just got a helluva lot sexier.
James is a MA student in screen studies and English. He received his BA in film studies and political science from the University of Oklahoma.
8 comments
Source: CQ Transcriptions, Town hall with Barack Obama in Lancaster, Va., Aug. 21, 2008, accessed via Nexis "That's what I will do in bringing all parties together, not negotiating behind closed doors, but bringing all parties together, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are, because part of what we have to do is enlist the American people in this process," Obama said at a debate in Los Angeles on Jan. 31, 2008.
Most transparent? What country are you living in Trenton? Obama said he would put discussions on tv so there would be no secret deals. He didn't. He said he would work with both parties. He isn't. He said he wouldn't sign a bill until all the earmarks were removed. That didn't happen. He said he wouldn't raise taxes on families making under 250k. Didn't happen. Letting the Bush tax cuts expire=tax increase. Being charged for health care for 3 yrs before being able to use it=tax increase (if it passes). Cap and trade (aka cap and tax): energy prices "necessarily skyrocket" (Obama's words not mine)=tax on energy companies=tax on the people. These are just the taxes off the top of my head.