The Onion has a funny video up about Democrat Party voters screwing with Barry Obama’s mind as the 2012 election kicks into gear.

Democrats: Obama Has Dicked Us Around For Four Years, Now It’s Our Turn

Back in February, The Huffing Post reported that Obama was virtually tied with a generic Republican counterpart going into November.  Rasmussen reported similar polling results last month.  And according to news reports for last week, that slim lead is not getting any wider.  What this means is that the election is well within the theft margin.

The reason for this razor-thin margin is obvious: Obama has adopted so many of the Republicans’ core policies – an ABC News poll last year found that a majority of Americans rate Obama as “just as bad” or “worse than” George W. Bush – that he presents no legitimate reasons for people to vote for him.  Web sites such as Obama the Conservative and Activist Post, whistleblowers including Thomas Drake, and bloggers including Glenn Greenwaldhave all documented the many ways in which Obama has adopted or exceeded all of the policies of his predecessors.

When the two major party candidates are so similar to one another, Harry Truman’s admonition is as relevant as ever:  ”Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.”  Even having watched as Bush and Cheney stole not one but two consecutive presidential elections – thefts that were successful in large part because the Democrat candidates were so close to their Republican counterparts on policy – Obama and his campaign team still think the failed Clintonian model is viable.  And that will cost them dearly come November.

Meanwhile, people are hungry for real alternatives, and they’re not buying into the Big Lie of Democrats not being as bad as the GOP anymore.  According to Gallup, forty percent of registered voters now identify themselves as being independent or belonging to one of the minor political parties.

With so many voters looking to punish both major parties in November, the Obama regime would do well to look back and learn from history, lest it become history.

Glenn Greenwald has written up yet another damning critique of Democrats’ dishonest attempts to claim public support for a public option while doing everything they can to kill it.

I’ll quote three paragraphs, the first ones, in Greenwald’s column. It’s revealing how the distraction and circus that is the furor over eliminating the filibuster provided cover for senators looking for any excuse they can muster to prevent real health care reform, and for Democratic partisans falling for it hook, line, and sinker.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what seemed to be a glaring (and quite typical) scam perpetrated by Congressional Democrats: all year long, they insisted that the White House and a majority of Democratic Senators vigorously supported a public option, but the only thing oh-so-unfortunately preventing its enactment was the filibuster: sadly, we have 50 but not 60 votes for it, they insisted. Democratic pundits used that claim to push for “filibuster reform,” arguing that if only majority rule were required in the Senate, then the noble Democrats would be able to deliver all sorts of wonderful progressive reforms that they were truly eager to enact but which the evil filibuster now prevents. In response, advocates of the public option kept arguing that the public option could be accomplished by reconciliation — where only 50 votes, not 60, would be required — but Obama loyalists scorned that reconciliation proposal, insisting (at least before the Senate passed a bill with 60 votes) that using reconciliation was Unserious, naive, procedurally impossible, and politically disastrous.

But all those claims were put to the test — all those bluffs were called — once the White House decided that it had to use reconciliation to pass a final health care reform bill. That meant that any changes to the Senate bill (which had passed with 60 votes) — including the addition of the public option — would only require 50 votes, which Democrats assured progressives all year long that they had. Great news for the public option, right? Wrong. As soon as it actually became possible to pass it, the 50 votes magically vanished. Senate Democrats (and the White House) were willing to pretend they supported a public option only as long as it was impossible to pass it. Once reconciliation gave them the opportunity they claimed all year long they needed — a “majority rule” system — they began concocting ways to ensure that it lacked 50 votes.

All of that was bad enough, but now the scam is getting even more extreme, more transparent. Faced with the dilemma of how they could possibly justify their year-long claimed support for the public option only now to fail to enact it, more and more Democratic Senators were pressured into signing a letter supporting the enactment of the public option through reconciliation; that number is now above 40, and is rapidly approaching 50. In other words, there is a serious possibility that the Senate might enact a public option if there is a vote on it, because it’s very difficult for these Senators to vote “No” after pretending all year long — on the record — that they supported it. In fact, The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim yesterday wrote: “the votes appear to exist to include a public option. It’s only a matter of will.”

The questions that advocates of killing democracy ignore whenever asked are:

“What will Democrats do when the GOP returns to power and finds itself newly endowed with the ability to ram its legislation and appointees down our throats with a mere 51 votes?”

“How is it that the Republicans managed to pass a number of bills, including Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, got their nominees such as John Bolton around filibuster threats on political appointees using recess appointments, and do it without eliminating the filibuster?”

So clearly the problem isn’t the filibuster, and as Greenwald points out, it is merely one of countless excuses the Democrats make for actively preventing legislation that might actually help people. As Greenwald points out, “If only 50 votes were required, they’d just find ways to ensure they lacked 50.” And then the GOP, benefiting from no longer having to worry about filibusters when they return to power in the Senate and maintaining rigid party discipline at most times, will finally have what it has always wanted: unfettered ability to force its extreme right-wing agenda down all our throats. The shortsightedness and inherent dishonesty in the eliminate-the-filibuster crowd’s pathetic arguments simply do not hold water, and they know it. The most they can do in response to effective arguments against killing democracy are to ignore these counter arguments completely, hoping they’ll go away, or stoop to insult and ridicule.

That’s not the way to get anything done, and it doesn’t accomplish anything except to make it even easier for the supposed opposition while alienating supposed allies on the left.