Barack Obama may be frustrated with how his economic stimulus plans are proceeding, but hey, join the club: Everyone in Washington right now has something to be frustrated about.

The House yesterday voted on Obama's stimulus package — you know, the one he so badly wanted to have bipartisan support for that he stripped contraception funding from it? Well, despite pissing off everyone from Planned Parenthood to NOW to NARAL (on a day when the latter is laying people off), not a single Republican voted for the thing. White House aides like spokesman Robert Gibbs are trying to spin this as anything but a repudiation of Obama, his charm offensive, his policies or his plans for a post-partisan Washington and are claiming that it's the vote on the inevitable conference report — since the Senate bill is already different and about to get different-er with the addition of government-guaranteed mortgages to it in the Senate — but it's all kind of bullshit because they even lost 11 Democratic votes yesterday. And when you lose so bad that Republican Congressman Eric Cantor can say shit like "Keynesian economics doesn't hold a candle to the entrepreneurship that made this economy so prosperous up until the last six months" — even though he knows and I know his econ guys know that the government says the recession started in December 2007 — and no one calls him on it or thinks that's a completely false statement, you're losing ground fast. But, hey, the Senate will pass SCHIP fucking finally today and Obama will get his Ledbetter photo op and more people will say, "It's only been a week! Give him time!" in the face of criticism while the Republican National Committee holes up and tries to figure out a strategy to use all this and more to win back seats in the House and Senate in 2010, so everything will be ok. We can just rely on them continuing to campaign with their heads up their asses in order to keep Democratic majorities. That's a great strategy.

It's sort of almost as good as current Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's strategy to appear on every talk show known to man on Monday to claim his impeachment trial is a way to raise taxes on ordinary people in Illinois and then turn around and demand to give a closing statement and the impeachment trial that he's been skipping in order to disprove his obvious guilt to some perhaps gullible jurors. Or as good as Pepsi accusing the Obama camp of appropriating their imagery rather than the other way around. Or as good a strategy as being former McCain blogger Michael Goldfarb, who's gone back to "journalism" and is telling everyone that you'd have had to have been "a lunatic" to think McCain would win and that he was hired to do no less than attack his own supposed profession. Or, um, sending Obama to Canada on February 19th when everyone knows it will be fucking cold, but, hey, he's not a wimp like us D.C. folk when it comes to winter weather so it will be fine/appropriate karmic retribution. It's a day of great strategery all around, the likes of which we haven't seen for more than a week since GWB didn't let the door hit him on the ass on the way out.

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