As the day has gone along, more and more Democratic politicians are proving themselves to be part of the chickenshit wing of the party as regards to the Affordable Care Act and its software glitches and because, when you hand Democratic politicians an obvious chance to crush their political opposition, and to do so in support of a law that will help anyone except investment bankers, they will refuse to do so lest Debbie Wasserman Schultz be overcome by the vapors and lest the New York Times editorial board weep copious tears of abject sorrow.

First, there's Rick Nolan of Minnesota, who's decided to fag-bait the president on the way by. Maybe he wants a date with Maureen Dowd.

Without identifying a specific person who should be held accountable, Rep. Rick Nolan (D-MN) told reporters that Obama must "man up, find out who was responsible, and fire them," as quoted by the Associated Press. Nolan made similar remarks in a phone interview with television station WCCO. "I really believe he needs to, you know, man up, step up," Nolan said.

Nothing says bipartisan cooperation like someone's head on a stick.

And now comes Michelle Nunn, daughter of ur-corporate-Democrat Sam Nunn, who has a decent chance of being a senator from Georgia because the Republican primary field is completely packed with Christianist gooney-birds, and, while she likes the parts of the law that poll really well, she'd just as soon finagle the part of the Affordable Care Act that makes all the good stuff possible.

"There are parts of the law that are already helping families here in Georgia. Georgians shouldn't be denied coverage because they have a pre-existing condition and young adults should be able to stay on their parent's health plan when they are first starting out and looking for work. Under the law, there are no life time or annual limits on coverage and those who suffer a catastrophic illness don't have to worry about losing their savings or their homes. But we need to fix what's wrong with the law. After all, I know from my own experience with start-ups that when you start a business, it takes time to get it right and it often requires meaningful adjustments and course corrections. The same goes for fixing this law."

And the hell of it all is that every bit of this Democratic cutting and running is taking place just as the Republicans are overplaying their hand in the Congress again. They had something of a opportunity with the glitches in the website rollout, abetted as that was by a courtier press just desperate to have a both-sides narrative to pimp again. However, at the hearings today, the loons were calling loudly, and we didn't just hear about the glitches, we heard about the secret Mooslim Kenyan plot to steal all our private medical informationand sell it to the UN warlords so they can use it to take away our guns and golf courses. Or something.

"How in the world can this be HIPAA compliant when HIPAA is designed to protect the patient's privacy and this explicitly says in order to continue you have to accept this condition that you have no privacy - no reasonable expectation of privacy?" Barton asked Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president of CGI, one of the firms that wrote the website. He was referring to The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the law that guarantees "federal protections for individually identifiable health information held by covered entities and their business associates and gives patients an array of rights with respect to that information." Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) pushed back against the implications, arguing that "HIPAA only applies when there's health information is being provided," not the biographical enrollment information that's being entered by programmers. "HIPAA doesn't apply. There is no health information in the process. You're asked about your address, your date of birth. you are not asked health information," he said..."I will not yield to this monkey court or whatever it is," Pallone said in response to Republican interruptions.

Joe Manchin. DWS. Claire McCaskill. Rick Nolan. Michelle Nunn.

Throwing themselves on the mercy of the monkey court.

Jesus, these people.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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