Yesterday, I called Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) an idiot for his GOP like remark about "bleeding heart liberals."

Today, I would like to add that neither Durbin nor any of his Democratic ilk should dare call themselves real Democrats when they support the requirement that all workers carry a biometric national ID care.

Digby, in her blog, says this about the stupid ID proposal: "Is it possible that they thought it was smart to throw that in as a bargaining chip? If so it shows once again that Democrats should never, ever play poker."

If these bumbling Dem leaders on Capitol Hill consider that a bargaining chip, they really are dumb and yes, they are terrible poker players.

Durbin et al. seem to be following Obama's script of placation, conciliation, and ingratiation when dealing with GOP, Wall Street, and corporations which has been extremely detrimental for the common good and a betrayal of basic Democratic Party principles.

As Digby writes about the catastrophic oil spill and Obama's embrace of offshore drilling: "Obama tried to help out his pal Huckleberry [GOP senator, Lindsay Graham] get some non-existent votes lined up for the energy bill and begin his inevitable turn to the right for 2012. And it didn't work out. When a policy is this bad, it rarely does.

"The president trusted BP to handle things because they are "experts" and there aren't more requirement and regulations because they can't upset Little Lindsay and the rest of the planetary destruction caucus.

"Democrats need to stop trying to be clever. They aren't good at it. The split the baby approach on offshore drilling has resulted in the Obama Administration owning this environmental disaster, and it was for nothing. They were never going to get Republicans to vote for any kind of climate change legislation this year, not even Lindsay, who I would bet a hundred dollars would have ended up "having" to vote against it because somebody "betrayed" him if it did manage to get to the floor. It's a fools game to try to finesse these right wingers.

"Now, it's certainly possible that the administration actually believed that off shore drilling is a good thing to do on the merits. If so, they've just learned a valuable lesson about listening to oil men who say that what they do is perfectly safe and not to worry our pretty little heads about it. Not that it should take a huge disaster like this to do that --- we had one about twenty years ago which nearly destroyed the pristine Alaskan coastline. It shouldn't have to happen ever couple of decades to remind people of what the risks to the environment are.

"But in this case, I honestly doubt they even thought much about it beyond a craven political deal with Huckleberry that has now blown up in their faces. And as I said, it's really hard to defend them. They sold out their principled position for nothing in return. That's a risky thing to do and the risk has not paid off."

Obama apparently wants to make the Democratic Party conform to his vision, a skewed and myopic vision.

As Garry Wills writes in a book review of an Obama biography: 'Remnick presents Obama as a perpetual outsider who wins acceptance in whatever new company he joins....when he taught at the University of Chicago Law School, he won the respect of conservative professors there, including Richard Posner — “especially,” as Posner tells Remnick, “after one of my clerks, who had worked with him at The Harvard Law Review, told me that he wasn’t even all that liberal.”

"Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation....Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril....Obama has stressed continuity. 

"He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

"To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope."

What regular people in the US need from this president is a little less "cool" and more "fiery;" less placation, conciliation, flip-floping wishy-washying and more upholding of and fighting tor the common good, the principle for which he was elected.

We already know he shouldn't play poker. 

Unfortunately, increasingly more often, he doesn't act like a real Democrat either.