posted by Armadillo JoeIt's all over but the crying on health-care reform.
Oh sure, some kind of reform may eventually puke forth from Congress, but smart money is on it being weak, weak tea -- easy for insurance behemoths and their enablers in government to eventually smother into either meek acquiesence or to hammer into irrelevance -- and the end result won't look much different than present day, except that reform opponents will have a whole new vocabulary with which to rhetorically bash the shiny new government health program that only helps people different-looking than Glenn Beck. They will seize upon the tiniest of shortcomings or any outright failures in the new system, elevate them to the level of Proof of the Existence of a Satanic Socialist Conspiracy to Destroy America and Baby Jesus and our celebrities pretending to be journalists on the Tee-Vee will slather American screens with pictures of indolent black people and their crying babies suffering and dying at the hands of overwhelmed and disillusioned medical professionals, after which the pundits and other assorted performing monkeys will dutifully tut-tut about how silly we ever were to think that a rich and prosperous nation such as ours could summon the economic resources and moral courage to fix something as nebulous, unknowable and (frankly) unimportant as the health of poor people.
We will still be a worse-off, shabbier and more decrepit nation for the want of something better.
As much as the rest of us all know the "death panels" are bullshit, enough dimwitted goobers out there (many of whom carry guns, natch) let themselves be worked into a frenzy by the same manipulators who sold us a bogus war in Iraq and impeached a president for a blowjob, that the end-of-life provision -- the nugget around which the GOP was able to spin a web of lies -- has been essentially yanked from the bill and the Dems appear to largely be running for cover.
Obama isn't necessarily toast, but we only get a chance like this once a generation or so. In the case of health-care, it's more like two generations because the last two attempts (Clinton's in '94 and Ted Kennedy's back in the 1970's) were doomed to failure from the start. Of course, we didn't know that at the time, but the perspective of history tells us that the rising tide of Rethugli-goon misrule over the Nixon-to-Bush43 era was in many ways irresistable.
This one was different. If I have to explain why, you should be reading other websites.
I think Obama will wind up a severely weakened president on the other side of this. Probably as much as Carter because failing to advance the central component of your campaign platform with the kind of Congressional majorities and general popularity he has enjoyed in his first nine months in office means that you are weak enough to get rolled by a bunch of loud-mouthed goons willing to shout lies, aided and abetted by a compliant and power-savvy media complex. The way they will talk about him after this debacle, especially if one considers how central a role Sarah Palin (who lost the election, BTW, so why is she still on my Tee-Vee?) played in blowing a hole in the bottom of the health-care boat, will cause the rest of the spineless Dems to scatter for cover.
Blame whoever you want, say the media didn't report the whole debate fairly and honestly, say that the GOP is run by a bunch of thugs and goons and cynical operators manipulating a horde of racist nit-wit sheople, say that Washington is a cozy little village hostile to reform and hard-wired to advance the interests of the monied ruling class over those of the electorate, say the Dems are a bunch of scaredy-cats who wouldn't know party discipline if it hit them like a baseball bat to the knees and act like abused housewives in the face of GOP bullying, say that Obama was too high-minded and too in thrall to the Cult of Bi-Partisanship, say that this is all super-secret triple-back-flip Obama Kung-Fu and the bestest health-care bill
evah is just around the corner. Say whatever you damn well please about this awful smoldering wreck we see emerging before us, but at the end of the day it amounts to so much whining about how unfair Life is. Either Obama brought a knife to a gun fight or the Obama of the campaign trail -- Hope, Change, whatever -- is not the person we actually wound up putting in office with our votes. He's either weak or wiley but either way We The People lose.
I quote the ever astute
John Cole:
I still contend health care reform is over. The GOP and the fringe right will just move on to something else they find “objectionable” like this absurd accusation that voluntary counselling amounted to a panel of experts determining who should and should not live, the senior citizens seem overwhelmingly content to suckle at the public teat in regards to medicare while giving everyone else the bird, the insurance industry is playing both sides, half the Democrats are spooked by their own shadows, and the other half are in bed with the FIRE sector.
It is just over. And the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. If the Republicans had majorities like the Democrats have right now, they would have abolished the IRS and the Department of Education, Bernie Madoff would be running social security, there would be an oil well in every backyard and off every inch of coast, we’d have mandatory prayer in schools, and the defense department budget would be doubled so we could have excellent adventures in Iran while we liberate Georgia from oppressive Russian rule. And we’d be doing it all with a top marginal rate of 3%.
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