Congratulations on the Health Care Bill–99 and 54/100 % Pure. Republican Blogosphere: You Traitor, Cao!

Back when I was a kid, good sportsmanship was something you expected of everyone in the game. The losers were supposed to take their loss without whining or rancor, the winners weren’t supposed to **** them up the ***. That hasn’t been the Republican way for some time now. Good sportsmanship is something to be demanded … of the OTHER guy. Remember the Bush years? The Republicans said, “We won–deal with it”. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, are the Republicans dealing with it in the good sportsman-like manner they expected of the Democrats? If you call doing everything in your power to try to make the winners regret being alive–I guess you could say they are! Remember how they called the Democrats obstructionist for not rubberstamping 100% of Bush’s judicial appointees without question? I think the Democrats had held up maybe a dozen out of over 100 appointments. HORRORS! How can we get anything done with these bullies holding up ALL our appointments! But twe sure are getting models of cooperation NOW!
Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party are to be congratulated on passing SOME kind of Health Care Reform. It’s nowhere near perfect–we are told that it is to be a platform for more improvements–but frankly, since none of it is going to take effect until 2013 and it won’t be fully operational until 2019, I don’t really see how any substantial improvements are going to be made for another 10 years. After all, we’ll have to give it a chance, first. In the meantime, the health insurance companies and pharmaceutical industry have five years to squeeze every nickel out of the American people so hard, Thomas Jefferson will get acne scars–and if the credit card companies are any indication, we’ll be seeing rate hikes and deductible rises the second the Senate passes its own bill–provided a Senate bill DOES get passed.
Will Rogers once said, “I don’t belong to an organized political party–I’m a Democrat.” Considering how much Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have had to fight their own party members to get this one thing done that everyone in the country said was REALLY REALLY important, I suspect even old Will would be surprised at how dysfunctional the Democrats are today. I mean, with a 50 seat majority, how this bill managed to get passed by only 5 votes–if three people had changed votes, it would have failed–it just boggles the mind. They even had to tack anti-abortion idiocy on it to make sure they got even those five votes. WTF does abortion have to do with it???
Back to the Republicans–despite claiming NOT to be the party of NO, their strategy was to present a unified block of negativity in an effort to make Health Care Reform an epic fail for the Obama team. They needn’t have bothered–the Democrats were doing fine on that score alone. But, after the bill had gotten the requisite 218 votes, one lone Republican–Joseph Cao from a mostly Democratic district in Louisiana–decided to cast a Yea. Minority Leader Cantor stormed from the chambers and a torrent of invective was let loose by the right wing blogosphere and Twitterati. TRAITOR! HOW NOW, MAO CAO? You’d think that Republicans were the only true Americans and that taking away profits from the parasitical health insurance companies was unAmerican! On that note, don’t think it hasn’t gone unnoticed that Cao emigrated from Vietnam and only “became” an American citizen instead of being born here. He isn’t “a real American”. He’s a “gook” who should go back to Vietnam–if he likes COMMUNISM that much. My personal favorite was calling him “cat-eater”–HA! everyone knows the Vietnamese outlawed cat-eating a few years ago to cure the rat problem! Michelle Malkin asked rhetorically what Obama gave him to change his vote and said he was bought cheap by the promise of help for Katrina victims–who as we all know don’t deserve it (IRONY ALERT). And of course, impeachment threats and promises that he will lose his seat next election season the unsavory mix. I’m not sure Cao was quite ready for it all. BTW-how much have we heard about any of this? Not a thing unless you were looking for it, not just from the MSM, but not even the liberal blogs have been paying it much attention –has it reached the point when Republicans do something so completely racist and partisan, it’s no longer news?
Anyway, I wouldn’t be patting myself on the back for having crafted a bipartisan bill. Like I say in the title, 99 and 54/100s per cent pure Democratic vote does not equal bi-partisan in anyone’s books. The best you can say is that it wasn’t unanimously rejected by Republicans, thanks to Joseph Cao. Alas, he may not be in Congress more than another year.
On to the Senate!

Palin’s Pick, Preferred by Pawlenty, in Potsdam and Plattsburgh, got Plainly and Powerfully Pwned

This is going to grab me no readers–after all, the results of this past Tuesday’s election are already wrapping yesterday’s fish. Which is odd, considering the runup which made it seem like it was the most important election after the last election (as Jon Stewart noted). Yesterday we had 24 hours of “Was this a referendum on Obama?” or “Was it just local politics?” Myself, I think it was a little bit of the former and a LOT of the latter. But That is NUANCE. And Cable TV News doesn’t do nuance. Leaving aside Faux News as a propaganda machine, the other two 25/8 news networks wouldn’t know nuance if it grabbed a mallet from hammerspace and hit them over the head. I mean, when Wolf Blitzer accidentally got a confession from Balloon Boy, someone had to whisper it in his earpiece before he even noticed what he’d tripped over. And over on MSNBC, Chris Matthews’ idea of a debate resembles more a college wrestling match than any intellectual exchange–2 out of 3 throws. But I shouldn’t take them to task–even the newspapers don’t do nuance any more–and they wonder why they’re being run out of business by the Internets.
Anyhow, to return to Tuesday’s election, pretty much everything happened the way it could really be expected–no matter how much anyone hoped otherwise. But the fun race of the day was Congressional District 23 of New York. District 23 has gone Republican for the last 2000 years, and this year it promised no difference. IF it hadn’t been for the teabaggers who decided that the Republican candidate, Dierdre Scozzafava, was a closet lefty, planning to bring socialism down on the heads of her constituents. After all, she supported abortion rights and gay marriage, the next thing you know, she would be demanding the re-distribution of wealth. So they sent in their ringer, Doug Hoffman. Hoffman, who had to be told where the 23rd District was, had no idea what its issues might be–he was being sent in to defend the country from Kenyan aliens masquerading as Hawaiians. Soon Sarah Palin descended upon the 23rd District, tho’ invited by none. Along with Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, they supported the hell out of Dougie.
Now you know the deer in the headlights look. Imagine that deer suddenly noticing a 16-wheeler coming hellbent down the highway at 85 mph and you’ll have a good idea of how Doug Hoffman started to look. I mean seriously, I’ve never seen a candidate with a more shell-shocked expression on his face–if he opened his eyes any wider, they would have exploded from the pressure differential. Because of or in spite of Sarah’s help, he started taking Scozzafava’s voter base and Scozzafava dropped out–instructing her supporters to vote for the DEMOCRAT, Bill Owens, who was at least playing fair. Despite that clue, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and the rest, all fell over themselves predicting a landslide for the carpetbagger. The entire MSM called it the most important race of all time because it would show how much support Obama had lost and how important the teabaggers had become.
Then Dougie lost. The 23rd went Democrat for the first time in two millenia and … everyone switched gears and started discussing NJ and VA and THAT became the referendum on Obama. And by Monday, no one will even remember if we had the most important off-off year election of the century last Tuesday.
Have a good weekend folks 🙂

Health Care Reform–Anorexic Shock?

Let’s start off by saying that Joe Liebermann is such a jackass. There, that feels good, doesn’t it? Practically on the very day that the Congressional Budget Office projects that not only will Health Care Reform with the public option not increase the deficit, it will lower it, Joe Liebermann says he will join the filibuster because of his concern that it will increase the deficit. This is the same Joe Liebermann who as a young senator supported abolishing the filibuster, but now that he is older and wiser, realizes that it’s the only way a dedicated minority can tie the federal government in knots. I say “dedicated minority” since that excludes the Democratic Party, which is constitutionally incapable of agreeing with itself. And since Joe caucuses with the Democrats but votes with the Republicans–he calls it independence, other call it “being a quisling”–he wants the dedicated minority to be able to screw things up as much as possible.
Suffice it to say, however, that since Joe Liebermann has been flirting with the Republican Party, he probably can’t read anymore–otherwise, he’d never have made such an asinine criticism. But, you know, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Is the “public option” something worth all the effort that’s been put into it? According to that same CBO report, the public option is only going to affect 2% of all Americans…by 2019, up to 6 million people will make use of that long and hard fought for provision. Now 6 million people is nothing to sneeze at–except when you compare it to the most probable 2020 population of just over 300 million people. And that’s 10 years down the road. The public option won’t even kick in until 2013. Hell, most of the baby boomers with be on Medicare by then. *I* will be on Medicare by then! Moreover, the public option isn’t going to be free–it will have a price sticker roughly equivalent to private health insurance. I say roughly because it’s going to be a little bit higher–we don’t want it to actually compete with private health insurance! We want that industry to stay healthy, even if it starves the middle class! That’s kind of like eating nutritious meals so our tapeworm doesn’t get malnutrition. And furthermore–everyone will have to have health insurance or pay a fine! The poor will get a subsidy so they can afford to buy it, but we’re talking about an enforced expansion of the health insurance customer base. You would think the health insurance companies will be pleased by this. Nosireebob! They’re too busy griping about not being able to drop customers because they have expensive conditions. If that profit margin goes down, they’ll have to raise rates to protect their executive bonuses! About the only good thing about the public option as it now stands is that it has backdoored a tax on the top 1%. But not to worry–they’ll soon find a way out of THAT!
The question is, with all the stuff negotiated away to achieve this public option goal, is the final result what we bargained for? I mean, we gave away our ace-in-the-hole, single payer health care, what the people of this country both need and deserve, even before negotiations started. Since then, it’s been like Chico and Groucho negotiating a contract, stripping aways clauses until all we have left is the sanity clause–and as we all know, there ain’t no such thing as a Sanity Clause! In the efforts to get something that could be called a “public option”, have the various committees thrown away so much substance that all that is left is skimpier than a stripper’s bikini? Kucinich’s state-by-state single payer option got tossed because it was too meaty and might have jeopardized passage of the program, but it’s altogether possible the program is going to die of anorexic shock all on its own. Some people say that something is better than nothing, but we really have to ask ourselves if we are not actually condemning ourselves to another ten or more years of slow strangulation by the parasitical health insurance industry just so we can say that we achieved “something”?
I don’t know–as they say on cable innuendo news, I’m just asking–but I’ve reached the end of my column, so let’s end up with something we can all agree on… Joe Liebermann is such a jackass!

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Cartoons and text by Greg Uchrin (aka Gregorius alexandrinus), with the able assistance of Fred and Bert Squirrel, with special appearances by George Dymme. Published once a week on Mondays.

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