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health reform

Blame everyone but the big guy

By timmukyPosted on Posted in obama, politicsTagged , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment on Blame everyone but the big guy

Updated below.

And again.

I am not going to defend Rahm Emanuel. He’s never been more than a corrupt, self-interested, low-life would-be hard guy who’s not even really that hard. His role model, that pudgy lump o’ Rove, is the real deal, a completely psychotic fire-breather who would do anything for his party. Rahm has convinced many that he puts the party’s fortunes above everything. Leaving aside the larger question of whether that’s a good thing, lately even those who think he’s a necessary evil have had to reappraise a. his commitment to his party, and/or b. his competence.

Firedoglake blogger TBogg:

So all I really wanted for Christmas was a Karl Rove of our own who would make all of our Obama wishes come true, even if he had to kick Evan Bayh’s mushy skull in to accomplish them. Someone who, I had hoped, would make Joe Lieberman’s life something akin to a hemorrhoidectomy gone horribly terribly wrong.

Such is not the case:

The White House wants Reid to hand Joe Lieberman the farm.

An aide briefed on discussions with the White House says that there would be no story if Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel hadn’t interceded. The aide confirmed an account, reported by Huffington Post, that Emanuel visited Reid personally, telling him to cut a deal with Lieberman.

Then the aide provided more detail.

Emanuel didn’t just leave it to Reid to find a solution. Emanuel specifically suggested Reid give Lieberman the concessions he seeks on issues like the Medicare buy-in and triggers.

“It was all about ‘do what you’ve got to do to get it done. Drop whatever you’ve got to drop to get it done,” the aide said. All of Emanuel’s prescriptions, the source said, were aimed at appeasing Lieberman–not twisting his arm.

If Rahm Emmanuel is all he was supposed to be, we can safely assume that the Obama White House either never gave a shit about health care reform, or they managed health care reform so horrifically and incompetently that they are now willing to settle for a “win”, no matter how meager.

For more of the same, see “Rahm’s making the White House look terrible,” especially the impassioned comments section. So many former true believers think this is the last straw, but so many are still acting like Rahm’s a maverick operative acting against the wishes of his benign boss, who really does have the best interests of the country at heart.

I don’t know what it will take to convince the Obamamaniacs.

Update.  Well, as Jane Hamsher points out, at least Russ Feingold isn’t afraid to finger the Prez:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

“This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” said Feingold.

Update 2 Glenn Greenwald says everything I’ve just said, and says it better.

In essence, this reinforces all of the worst dynamics of Washington. The insurance industry gets the biggest bonanza imaginable in the form of tens of millions of coerced new customers without any competition or other price controls. Progressive opinion-makers, as always, signaled that they can and should be ignored …. Most of this was negotiated and effectuated in complete secrecy, in the sleazy sewers populated by lobbyists, industry insiders, and their wholly-owned pawns in the Congress. And highly unpopular, industry-serving legislation is passed off as “centrist,” the noblest Beltway value.

And, in an update, he comes up with this classic dissection of Obama/Emanuel excuse-making:

It’s also worth noting how completely antithetical claims are advanced to defend and excuse Obama. We’ve long heard — from the most blindly loyal cheerleaders and from Emanuel himself — that progressives should place their trust in the Obama White House to get this done the right way, that he’s playing 11-dimensional chess when everyone else is playing checkers, that Obama is the Long Game Master who will always win. Then, when a bad bill is produced, the exact opposite claim is hauled out: it’s not his fault because he’s totally powerless, has nothing to do with this, and couldn’t possibly have altered the outcome. From his defenders, he’s instantaneously transformed from 11-dimensional chess Master to impotent, victimized bystander.

Obama’s delusion, and then some….

By timmukyPosted on Posted in afghanistan, health reform, politics, populismTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , No Comments on Obama’s delusion, and then some….

Obama’s Delusion, David Bromwich’s essay on the slowly unfolding disaster that is the Obama presidency, is about the best thing I have read to date on the subject. It’s more charitable than I tend to be towards the current ruling party and its head, and at the same time more damning.

Blame goes in all directions: to the right-wing noise machine and the unseemly machinations of Limbaugh, Cheney, Bob Woodward and the generals; and also, to Obama himself, whose political instincts are shown pretty convincingly to amount to a delusion.

Yet he is also encumbered by the natural wish of the moderate to hold himself close to all the establishments at once: military, financial, legislative, commercial. Ideally, he would like to inspire everyone and to offend no one. But the conceit of accommodating one’s enemies inch by inch to attain bipartisan consensus seems with Obama almost a delusion in the literal sense: a fixed false belief. How did it come to possess so clever a man?

Worthy of note, this beautiful and concise characterization of the opposition party:

The Republican Party of 2009 is a powerful piece of contrary testimony. It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants and ‘aliens’.

(Even his supporters would probably be content to see “money is speech” engraved on McConnell’s tomb. It’s an epithet the unpleasant man who represents my woebegone state seems perversely proud of. “Hard as nails and mean as dirt” seems more apt.)

As for Obama himself, it would be hard to find a better chronology of the president’s serial missteps than you’ll find here. And there are plenty of harsh words left over for the “prosperous neoliberal consensus,” something with which Bromwich, who teaches at Yale, is intimately familiar:

Equality in the United States in the early 21st century has become a gospel preached by the liberal elite to a populace who feel they have no stake in equality. Since the Reagan presidency and the dismemberment of the labour unions, America has not known a popular voice against the privilege of the large corporations. Yet without such a voice from below, all the benevolent programmes that can be theorised, lacking the ground note of genuine indignation, have turned into lumbering ‘designs’ espoused by the enlightened for moral reasons that ordinary people can hardly remember. The gambling ethic has planted itself deep in the America psyche – deeper now than it was in 1849 or 1928. Little has been inherited of the welfare-state doctrine of distributed risk and social insurance. The architects of liberal domestic policy, put in this false position, make easy prey for the generalised slander that says that all non-private plans for anything are hypocritical.

This is not a pretty picture, and Bromwich concludes in an unsatisfactory manner, by addressing only one of the many traps faced by the president. This particular trap, Afghanistan, is the one most of Obama’s own making. “The best imaginable result just now, given the tightness of the trap, may be ostensible co-operation with the generals, accompanied by a set of questions that lays the groundwork for refusal of the next escalation. But in wars there is always a deep beneath the lowest deep, and the ambushes and accidents tend towards savagery much more than conciliation.”

A Congress of Nancys

By timmukyPosted on Posted in health reform, politicsTagged , , , No Comments on A Congress of Nancys

the original milfOh, how I miss Weeds. The disappointing season finale of Mad Men* put me in mind of a show that did it right: with a jaw-dropping surprise that leaves the viewer, at least this viewer, gasping in anticipation of what will happen next season.

Nancy Botwin is ever on my mind, I guess, but more so in the wake of the Health Reform Bill from Hell that passed through the House this weekend. I know: Nancy Pelosi and Steyne Hoyer do not totter around on stiletto heels in body-conscious apparel, sucking down prodigious  quantities of designer coffees. (In fact, allow me to pause while I try to erase such ghastly images from my memory.) But Nancy and our esteemed representatives in Congress have one very major thing in common. They have a job that is a front for a business.

In Nancy’s case, the job has been most recently managing a maternity boutique in a sleepy mall. Her business, however, was all about the drug- and human-trafficking tunnel to Mexico beneath the shop. She spends her day pretending to do her innocent little job, when in reality she is involved in a much more lucrative, and sinister, business.

Same with congressmen and senators. Their job is to APPEAR to represent the people and to protect them from the predations of the wealthy and powerful, but their BUSINESS is to enable the wealthy and powerful to extract every last ounce of flesh and blood from the people. If they do their job well, they are praised effusively by their victims.

_______

* I am aware that I’m in the minority on this.

On that “historic” health reform bill (from hell)

By timmukyPosted on Posted in health reform, politicsTagged , No Comments on On that “historic” health reform bill (from hell)

Chris Floyd, who declares that HR3962 will kill real health reform for a generation:

Of course, the House bill, bad as it is, will be mangled beyond all recognition in that elitist abattoir known as the Senate, where no doubt even the few milder-than-milquetoast ameliorations that survived the corporate bludgeoning in the House will be cast aside. But for now, this is how, in the words of Barack Obama, our Democratic solons “answered the call of history”: with a bill that places an onerous financial burden and threat of punishment on those least able to bear it, while stripping millions of the most vulnerable women in society from access to completely legal medical procedures easily available to the middle-class and the rich, and delivering to the corrupt, cruel and price-gouging insurance companies “50 million new consumers, many of them subsidized by the taxpayers,” in the gushing words of Nancy Pelosi, who shepherded the bill through the House — and who was responsible for stripping abortion coverage from poor women by greenlighting the single allowed amendment to the bill.

David Swanson on the “well, at least it’s something” school of thought:

And why is a bill better than no bill? Why is a bill that funds absolutely useless parasites like health insurance companies at the expense of our grandchildren’s unearned pay better than nothing? Why — when blocking a bill would almost guarantee a better debate in round 2 — is it more important to pass the bill and close off the opportunity for valuable reform?

And Arthur Silber, in a piece with the to-the-point title The Fuck You Act:

Given the nature of the corporatist system that now throttles every aspect of life in the U.S., that is how the system works. That’s how it’s set up, and that’s its purpose. The fact that insurance companies will reap huge rewards on the backs of “ordinary” taxpaying Americans is not a regrettable byproduct of an allegedly good but imperfect effort at reform, or a flaw that will be fixed at some unspecified future date. And as already powerful and wealthy interests become more powerful and wealthy, the State will also increase its already massive power over all our lives still more. None of that is incidental: it’s the point.

Earlier this summer Matt Taibbi called it pretty much exactly, and explained why thusly:

Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing….

This whole business, it was a litmus test for whether or not we even have a functioning government. Here we had a political majority in congress and a popular president armed with oodles of political capital and backed by the overwhelming sentiment of perhaps 150 million Americans, and this government could not bring itself to offend ten thousand insurance men in order to pass a bill that addresses an urgent emergency. What’s left? Third-party politics?

Uh, yeah.

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