we won't get fooled fucked again

I'm sure that you all remember my writing a few days ago that:

We are going to get exactly the national healthcare program that the insurance and medical industries want us to. Which is to say, whichever one will continue to maximize their profits.

Well, as we all learned today, it looks like that $1.4 million dollars a day that the insurance and healthcare industry has been spending on lobbying has turned out to be a great investment.

I am so infuriated by all this that I was planning on something of a rant here. But then I read today's post by The Rude Pundit and realized that anything I wrote on the subject would barely qualify as sloppy seconds. And yes, I know it is extremely bad blogging form to quote someone else's entire post, but fuck it, I'm going to do it anyway. (Frankly, I'm guessing that in the astronomically small likelihood that the rude one happens by, he probably wouldn't be too upset. And you should read him everyday as a matter of course.) A warning: true to his nom de blog, this is, in fact, extremely rude. Read it anyway.

Health Care Reform: The Baseball Bat or the Spooge Spray?
It doesn't really help matters when there's a half-dozen power-brokering Senators esconced in an office, having secret meetings that will, in all likelihood, determine the way the health care system in this country is "reformed." Let's be honest: at this point, when a scumfucker from an insurance company is confronted by a crawling middle-aged woman who can't afford the hip replacement she needs because of her years waiting tables at Waffle House, the insurance bastard has a choice: beat her with a baseball bat or jack off on her. Under the current system, he'd be wailing on her skull with that Louisville Slugger that reads "pre-existing condition." Under the reform being squeezed out like a hard turd in Max Baucus's office, that poor short order waitress would have a back warm and sticky with Blue Cross semen.

It is the usual way for Democrats, thinking that bipartisanship means giving Republicans what they want. It's as if the Democrats were a family inviting a Republican family over for the Democratic daughter's My Little Pony birthday party, but the Republican family won't come unless the Democratic family changes it to a Bakugan party so the Republican son can feel welcome. Instead of telling the Republican family to go fuck itself, the Democratic family makes sure that every cute plastic pony is facing down some horrible mutating machine. It's okay for bipartisanship to mean that Democrats invite Republicans to play. If they don't wanna, then the hell with 'em.

The right wing actually believes that any kind of health care reform is some Ernst Blofeldian nefarious plot (and, seriously, even though it's a "bipartisan" group in Baucus's office, it just doesn't help) to destroy the country. Here's Hugh Hewitt, whose picture looks like he's touching himself, thinking about how to fuck your child while your dog licks his asshole, doing one of those "I don't know what the fuck to write about today" columns, wherein the writer imagines the presumed thoughts of someone else and speaks in his or her voice. In the Washington Examiner, Hewitt gets inside Congressman Henry Waxman's head on health care reform, giving the mustachioed bald man the evil designs and voice of Montgomery Burns, as if his efforts to get poor people health insurance are actually just part of some Machiavellian megalomaniacal machinations to destroy America:

"But we are not there yet. Deep breaths and calm down. So close, and I have to deal with this yokel from Arkansas and this turnip from Louisiana. Why do those states even get to vote?...Blue dogs? Dead dogs when this is over. Another chapter for the memoir: 'Sucker punching the suckers from the South.' We really ought to have a literacy test for the House. But stay calm now. Stay focused. Thirty-five years to get to this precise moment --at the center of the rewriting of the American Constitution through the administrative state."

Does Hewitt actually imagine that that's what supporters of a state health insurance plan think? Even subconsciously? Let's put aside that it's shabbily written. Howzabout the fact that now Hewitt, who was like a high school cheerleader with a soaked pussy ready for team captain George W. Bush to fuck under the bleachers whenever he was between scrimmages, is concerned about the Constitution?

Who, exactly, are the Blue Dog Democrats (and the Republicans) trying to please here? Fucking Hugh Hewitt and the other conservative drones aren't gonna nuance this shit out. They're not gonna sit there and think, "Well, at least they didn't pass a public plan financed by a tax on rich people" and then accept whatever comes down the pike. If even the mildest health reform passes, the one that says one-legged American orphans with TB must get coverage, Rush Limbaugh will scream like someone at McDonald's told him they couldn't batter his Big Mac and put it in the deep fryer.

In the push to be able to say they got something passed when they had majorities in both Houses of Congress, the Democrats are shifting the organizing principle of the argument from universal coverage to keeping costs for the already-insured down. And you can bet that, even then, the vast, vast majority of Republicans will vote it down because it's not bipartisan enough.