I have however been managing to keep track of leftist responses to the the Massachusetts Miracle and the apparent collapse of Obamacare, and I found some recent offerings from the leading lights of the progressive blogosphere highly amusing:  Krugman throwing up his hands and assaulting the big O with the kind of venom he normally reserves for right-wing troglodytes; Ezra Klein putting up an hilariously tone-deaf, naive and simplistic proposal (massively expand Medicare and Medicaid and pay for it by eating the rich); and Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo publishing an equally hilarious, 100% self-serving analysis from a Democrat hill staffer, who, like the MSNBC crew and your average 20-year-old Democratic Underground vulgarian, just doesn’t even remotely get it that there is nothing approaching an adequate constituency for the heroic progressivism of all their fantasies, or that disagreement on the practicality and wisdom of their approach can be anything other than sociopathologically insane and immoral.

I invite you to read the TPM post especially, and to imagine the proverbial world’s smallest violin playing all the way through.  The paragraph highlighted by Marshall is worth highlighting here, because it’s the point where the sheer disgust with political reality as everyone else understands it sneaks its way in:

The worst is that I can’t help but feel like the main emotion people in the caucus are feeling is relief at this turn of events. Now they have a ready excuse for not getting anything done. While I always thought we had the better ideas but the weaker messaging, it feels like somewhere along the line Members internalized a belief that we actually have weaker ideas. They’re afraid to actually implement them and face the judgement of the voters. That’s the scariest dynamic and what makes me think this will all come crashing down around us in November.

If your whole life and career are built around the idea that the federal government can and should take ever more control over American economy, culture, and politics, to the greatest glory of hill staffers and the undeserving, benighted “Members” they shepherd along – yes, I can see why you find the “dynamic” scary.

This sentence from The Life of Belisarius seems relevant to this all, but especially the Obamaism obituaries (and I’ve been eager to share it anyway):  “It is rarely that men reject any tale, however fantastic or improbable, provided it tends to show that their own sect or country is the peculiar favorite of heaven.”