Right-Wing TrollWatch, Part 1

From the comments in my FoxLand post from last week, Rex has this to say:

Logic 1 invalidates nothing. The fact that they can’t do anything with a super-majority is THEIR OWN FAULT. Saying there’s too many moderates and Republicans is simply an excuse.

This one comes out of a very basic misunderstanding that you can only buy into if you ignore all reality. Lots of people operate under the basic belief that Republican = conservative, Democrat = liberal. This is not true. It has never been true. Conservatives have been trying really, really hard to make the first half of that true in the last few years, but no one is really trying to make that happen on the Democratic side. Democrats have a supermajority, liberals do not. The public option (which is the root of this conversation's beginning) is a liberal policy. In the house that is based on democratic principles (direct election of the people based on population), there are more than enough liberals to get the policy passed. In the other house, the one based on states and not based on democratic principles, liberals still have a majority, but they are far from having a supermajority. In a straight up-or-down vote, it would pass. But Republicans, conservative Dems like Joe Lieberman and the Blue Dogs have enough votes to filibuster the bill, that is beat it with a minority. Seems to me it wasn't that long ago that up-or-down votes were a good thing. Now, conservatives hate them. Hypocrisy much?

So, here in the real world, saying that a bill can't be passed because there aren't enough votes for it isn't an excuse. Even if it were an excuse, it'd be a quite legitimate one based on what's really happening. If a public option doesn't pass, it'll be because conservatives, a minority, used a archaic rule to stop it.