I'm sorry that I am late again, America. I have been trying to get this site to work as it should, but my efforts to fix it with the MovableType software it uses have not been too successful. I continue to work at it though, and in the interim, here is this weeks letter.
Dear America,
On Wednesday, President Obama announced a new amalgam of the senate and congressional health care reform bills with several of the Republican ideas voiced in the inter party confabulation of the previous week. Of course, it wasn't enough for the Republicans that the President had not just listened to them but had also heard their plea for bipartisanship. It seems obvious now that anything short of endorsing the Republican bill that would insure 3,000,000 out of the 47,000,000 uninsured would not have satisfied them. To Republicans, bipartisan means "gimme what I want," whether it is money or health care reform. But the bald faced callousness and materialism of the Republican creed has gone over the top this time.
Lamarr Alexander, one of the Republican elder statesmen of the Senate, took to the airwaves on the very day of the President's announcement (which included the acknowledgment that "reconciliation" will probably be necessary because the Republicans do not want what the majority of the American people want, and they will never accept that fact) to denounce reconciliation with an argument that is so thin as to be transparent-- so self-serving as to be repugnant. He notes that reconciliation is only for budgetary matters, even though George Bush used it to ram through a tax cut that damn near quadrupled the national debt because it did not consider the impact it might have on the budget. But the palpable hypocrisy doesn't end there: the ever blathering John Boehner claims once again that the Democratic plan is a government takeover of healthcare and that we as a nation cannot afford it. The problem with both positions is how cleverly elliptical they are.
Starting with Alexander, it is now common knowledge that the reconciliation process that he decries has been used over twenty times in recent decades by both parties, and it has been used in all kinds of ways. The implication I take from Alexander's shameless apostasy relative to the Republican creed that was in operation when they were in the majority is that the Republicans think that the American people are not paying attention. But they have been called on these prevarications, these partial truths on which they rely, time after time, most recently when Newt Gingrich tried to blame Bill Clinton for shutting down the federal government.
The Speaker and his Republican majority had rammed through a budget for which Gingrich had arranged the timing so that the previous year's appropriations would expire if the President didn't sign the new budget, with its draconian cuts, immediately. But it was so unconscionable that Clinton called Newt's bluff, and when the public turned on the Speaker, he turned tail and ran. Before we knew it, his own venality and moral "flexibility" bit him you know where, and his reign of terror was over. Newt was a thing of the past.
And now, Boehner has joined the chorus, or should I say is leading it in singing the same old refrain: we are threatened with socialism and endless debt by the Obama administration's takeover of health care. But Boehner never talks about the fact that the CBO, a party-neutral agency within congress that "scores" proposed laws, says that the Democratic plans will reduce the deficit over the course of the next ten years. That means that the debt will increase at a slower rate if the bill is passed than it will if the Republicans get their way and it fails. But if Boehner sees that, he will lose what he thinks is his platform, so he not only doesn't see it, he refuses to look.
Besides refusing to acknowledge the budgetary realities though, he refuses to recognize that the American people want reform. They have all experienced either directly or indirectly the rapacity and callousness of the insurance industry. They have heard of the requests for near-thirty percent premium increases, or they are going to have to pay them themselves. They know people who can't get insurance because they have been sick before, or because their new employers don't offer it and they can't afford it for themselves. And The People see that limiting greed is not the same as socialism or government self-insertion into the process. To try to make the Democratic plan out to be tantamount to creeping socialism or "Big Brother"-ism" is like claiming that, as I have said before, the laws against slavery, discrimination, child labor and monopolies were unnecessary because society would have reformed itself given enough time. I suspect that it might be so, but did we really want to wait until that monkey wrote the collected works of Shakespeare on its typewriter?
Still, I am happy with the Republicans. At the rate they are going, they will never get back into a position of collective power. Guys like Congressman Massa from New York, who claims that he is not leaving office because his cancer has recurred, but that he is being hounded from office because one of his own staffers filed a complaint against him with the Ethics Committee for his foul, misogynistic mouth, just seal the Republicans' fate. I know it is not the popular opinion, but I think that the Republicans will lose seats in November. They seem incapable of learning their lesson, and I think that the American people will see that they have no choice. They can vote for those who want to help themselves and their friends, or they can vote to help you, America. All I can say is, you Republicans, keep on voting no, and you Americans, you keep on voting no too.
Your Friend,
Mike
Copyright © 2010 by Michael Wolf.
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