BROWN: A STRAIGHT UP-OR-DOWN VOTE IS "POLITICAL MANEUVERING"

Here's Brown in an interview with Time's Karen Tumulty, talking about the health care bill:

... It's not even a conference committee. They are bouncing it back and forth pursuant to a special maneuver. That just says to people [that] it's automatically "Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding." It's raising red flags, and people don't trust it. We can bring it back to the drawing board and do it again.

One possibility that people in Washington are talking about now is to ask the House to pass the Senate bill.

That's what I was talking about, the political maneuvering.

So a simple, open, public, broadcast-on-C-SPAN House vote on a bill that passed the Senate with 60% of the available votes -- which I would remind you is 8% more than Scott Brown got on Tuesday -- would be some sort of sleazy backroom deal? Some sort of arcane maneuver? A vote? An up-or-down vote?

This is the kind of talk that passes as reasonable when one party, and one party only, has been attacked for years on a 24/7/365 basis as subversively sleazy and hell-bent on acting in defiance of the people's wishes by the other party's ruthlessly efficient message machine, on every secular AM radio station in America and via a billionaire's hydra-headed media empire, whose flagship is a 24-hour propaganda puke funnel used by by millions. Brown is counting on readers' familiarity with the ongoing narrative of Democratic perfidy, and he's not wrong to count on it. Everyone's familiar with it, so every attack on alleged Democratic sleaziness is "sticky." Outside the small, insular world of committed liberals and lefties, there's no similar widely known narrative of Republican sleaze, not even after the Bush era.

Brown is also tapping into the tea partiers' Calvinball-like sense of what constitutes representative democracy. It isn't duly elected officials passing laws through the powers vested in them -- not when that process leads to results teabaggers don't like. When that happens, it's a tyrannical usurpation of power, and revolution is called for. Elections, in other words, should have only the consequences teabaggers like. Anything else is fascism, or totalitarianism, or something.