It can break your heart to see naivete go unpunished, but fortunately in this life, it rarely does so for long.

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(Yes I know, it’s a very hopey-changey movie, and honestly the ‘get rid of handguns’ thing at the end feels really tacked on)

So the Huffpo piece “Power Struggle: Inside The Battle For The Soul Of The Democratic Party” is the gift that keeps on giving; it’s just full of useful information.

One of the most fascinating parts for me was the discussion of just how shellshocked the Democratic leadership was by losing power in 1994, and how desperate, absolutely desperate, they are to retain power — at seemingly any cost.

For the next 12 years, Democrats came to Congress to run out the clock. Chastened by the losses of the 1980s and early 1990s, they triangulated, pushing policy positions not because they were good in and of themselves but because they were better than the opposite. They wanted to be in the majority because it was awful to be in the minority.

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After all, what could possibly hurt the progressive agenda more than losing the majority? A former Democratic staffer who came to the Hill in 2001 says padding the majority is a worthwhile endeavor.

“Anybody who actually says [we'd be better with a smaller, more progressive majority] may or may not have experienced the minority and doesn’t know how terrible it is living in that world,” he says. “It’s a shit world to live in. On the House side, to be in the minority, you get nothing. You get absolutely nothing. No legislation gets enacted. You have less staff. You have less resources. You have hundreds or thousands of well meaning young progressives out of work. It’s a terror — it’s an absolute terror.”

Yes, people being out of work, not having resources, that’d be a shame, wouldn’t it? Terrifying, even. It’s therefore good that we defer major political goals (like, say, reducing the catastrophic unemployment rate outside of the Capitol) to ensure that young progressive staffers don’t face unemployment of their own.

God-fucking-damn. Do these people listen to themselves talk, or is there some kind of mental filter that screens out narcissistic bullshit? I hope, if I ever acted like such a selfish douche in public, that the universe would have the mercy to shut my mouth for me. Maybe make a bird fly down my throat, or cause a sudden, highly localized earthquake to knock me off my feet so that the whole world can literally kick my ass.

This is the crux of the problem with our modern Democratic party, right here, and the reason I attached that video at the top and stole its phraseology; our so-called leaders are so paralyzed with fear that they stopped doing their jobs a long time ago, opting instead to take any expeditious route they can find toward KEEPING their jobs.

Because, in politics, performance doesn’t have to correlate with reward. You could work hard, craft logical legislation that advances the public good and then try to sell it to a public that admittedly cares more deeply about reality television and Twilight movies. That’s very hard, and there’s every chance you might lose your next election. Alternately, you could sell out, take huge sacks of cash from Wall Street, big polluters, health insurers and other scumbags, and blanket local tv with 30 second suckup ads extolling your great moderate virtues. That’s comparatively simple, and the odds are against your loss, thanks to the incumbency protection racket.

It’s a move right out of the Rahm playbook. We all know how that turned out last time, too.

What a sick, sad, vomitous world we live in.

The Huffington Post recently posted an utterly fantastic and incredibly illuminating look at the intra-party fighting, both within the Democratic Party as a whole and the Progressive Caucus in particular. It’s fairly long but incredibly compelling, and kept me up way past bedtime last night.

There’s enough material in there to write a dozen blog posts, and I intend to get into deeper detail on it later, but first there’s one blackly humorous note that I think deserves some attention. Over the course of the health care debate we often saw a lot of Obama supporters claiming that, contrary to any available evidence, the President deeply supported the Public Option. There were just… obstacles.. in the way to prevent him from, you know, actually supporting it. It might be Baucus, it might be Reid, it might be Lieberman or the House, but it was always something. Something that forced the sacrifice.

Of course, we know that not to be the case. Obama not only didn’t push for the Public Option, he actively campaigned against it, then traded it away in secret to the big for-profit hospitals.

Still, the depth of contempt the White House had, for this already heavily compromised bit of liberalism and its supporters, wasn’t in evidence until now:

Take the case of Reps. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and Chellie Pingree (D-Maine). This past January, the health care reform effort was collapsing amidst the rubble of the Senate special election in Massachusetts and Obama was talking publicly about paring reform down to a few essential pieces. Polis had a different idea. In a meeting that Pelosi held for Democratic rookies the week after Scott Brown’s surprise victory, he suggested reviving the public option. The Senate had lost its 60-vote supermajority and was in the process of considering the use of the reconciliation procedure, which would require only 50 votes and eliminate the need to placate public option opponents such as Sen. Joe Lieberman.

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As the number of senators joining the effort expanded, it generated leadership support, with Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Bob Menendez (N.J.) getting behind it. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was the next to jump on board.

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It gave new life to the effort and cemented the policy as a key legislative priority in the future.

“It helped a whole lot,” says Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the man in charge of whipping votes, of the Pingree-Polis letter. “The base getting fired up helped a whole lot. We could feel it out there.” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), reflecting on the letter, agrees. “It added energy to the effort to get to where we wanted to get,” he says in an interview in his office the week the House passed the final piece of reform.

The White House didn’t appreciate the new energy. A few hours after Reid’s office put out a statement in support of the public option, Rahm Emanuel met senior Reid aide Jim Manley and a few reporters from the Washington Post and the New York Times for dinner and drinks at Lola’s, a Capitol Hill bar and grill. Seeing Manley, Emanuel offered a response to Reid’s gesture with one of his own: a double-bird, an eerie sight given his half-severed right finger.

I’m beginning to think Rahm enjoys hippie punching as more of a fetish than a hobby.