It’s Obama’s turn. It amazes me how politically tone deaf these people are. But it’s of a piece with their competence in other areas, I suppose.

I hadn’t realized just how stupid George Pataki was until I read this:

“It is conceivable,” George Pataki, declared in 2000 when he signed a hate-crimes bill into law, “that if this law had been in effect one hundred years ago, the greatest hate crime of all, the Holocaust, could have been avoided.”

But if he decides to run for Senate, he’ll fit right in:

When asked by CNSNews.com what specific part of the Constitution authorizes Congress to mandate that individuals must purchase health insurance, Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill.) pointed to the part of the Constitution that he says authorizes the federal government “to provide for the health, welfare and the defense of the country.” In fact, the word “health” appears nowhere in the Constitution.

Picky, picky, picky. Of course, this is the guy who claimed that he couldn’t have bribed Blogojovic because “I ain’t got no money.”

The country’s in the very best of hands.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, so does Robert Gibbs think that there’s no concern that this could be unconstitutional, or that the White House doesn’t give a damn whether or not it is? Judging from their behavior in general, I’m going to go with option B.

…of Queen Nancy. She seems determined to drive her party over a cliff. OK by me.

More than a few Democrats in Congress are perplexed and worried that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insisting on ramming through a 1,900-page health care bill on Saturday, just days after her party took heavy losses in Tuesday’s elections. “It reminds me of Major Nicholson, the obsessed British major in the film ‘Bridge on the River Kwai,'” one Democrat told me. “She is fixated on finishing her health care bridge even as she’s lost sight of where it’s going and what damage it could cause to her own troops.”

Indeed, the Speaker’s take on Tuesday’s off-year elections struck some of her own members as delusive “happy talk.” “From our perspective, we won last night,” a cheerful Ms. Pelosi told reporters, citing her party’s pick-up of a single House seat in a New York special election and retention of another strongly Democratic seat in California.

That’s not how many of her own troops see it. Democratic Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama told Politico.com that members are “very, very sensitive” to the fact that the agenda being pushed by party leaders has “the potential to cost some of our front-line members their seats.”

You don’t get it, Congressman. She doesn’t care about your seats, as long as she doesn’t lose her majority. She can do without you knuckle-dragging southerners.

And this is simply stupid, but explains why the Dems are screwing up so badly — they complete misread history:

One Democratic House moderate says the leadership has mislearned a lesson from the 1994 collapse of Hillary Clinton’s health care bill. “They believe they lost the elections that year because they failed to pass anything,” he says. “But they forget it might have been even worse if they’d passed the wrong bill.”

They lost the House in 1994 because (among several other things) a) they attempted to pass a similar bill and b) they passed the “assault weapons” ban and c) they had established a reputation for corruption, with Rostenkowski and others. Not to mention d) Newt came up with an appealing campaign strategy. All that’s missing for a similar earthquake next year is a Republican Party that isn’t brain dead — all the other ingredients in terms of corruption and overreach are already there, and if they ram this through the House, it will just add fuel to the fire, even if it dies in the Senate. Unfortunately, a smart Republican Party is often too much to ask for.