Duck, Cover & Cave

The battle is as good as over. President Obama sodomized his supporters over health insurance reform, just like he did when his administration had a golden opportunity to rein in Wall Street criminals. Despite his smooth style and golden tongue, Obama has caved to pressure from the GOP right and the all-powerful insurance lobby. The bastard wouldn’t even call the so-called public option by its proper title: Medicare for All.

The status quo wins again. This is no real surprise – even with a highly popular president whose party controls both houses of congress – because the insurance lobby has stymied health insurance reform for decades. When the dust settles in the next month or so, and a weak, ineffective bill emerges from congress, Obama will claim victory, but it will be of the pyrrhic variety. Millions of Americans will remain uninsured, and millions more will continue to lose battles with Cigna, Aetna and United Health over care decisions that belong in the hands of physicians but are made by insurance underwriters based on profit not health; personal bankruptcies resulting from medical expenses will also continue largely unabated.

Eric Alterman, who writes for the Nation and other national publications, said last fall that Obama would disappoint us; I figured he would, too, but hoped he would wait until at least midway through his first term. Like Bill Clinton, Obama talks a great game, hits the right notes in his speeches and public appearances, but when push comes to shove and his opponents go on offense, Obama folds like a dandy-lion in a hurricane.

Another similarity between Obama and Bill Clinton is Obama’s love fest with corporate interests. Obama had everything necessary – public opinion, numerous examples of corporate greed and incompetence -- to rein Wall Street in and instead abrogated his power by surrounding himself with the likes of Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner and Robert Rubin, not to mention a number of lesser alumni from Goldman Sachs. No wonder that Obama went soft on the speculators, crooks, and swindlers who brought our financial system to the brink and laid an enormous hurt on average working Americans.

Inauguration Day was the high water mark of the Obama Administration and the trip has been downhill since. Our President has no one to blame but himself for a fatal absence of cajones. Think back to when George W. Bush and the GOP held sway – that posse of greedheads and power mongers rammed bills through congress and treated Democrats like lackeys. Hell, Bush even sold the world a war without a shred of factual justification, and when the world balked, Bush laughed and pulled the trigger anyway. Because of Dick Cheney, Bush had a better understanding of power politics than Obama or any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. Politics is war, and in war you don’t seek to make friends with your opponents, you destroy them.

Typical fucking Democratic Party. Give them Congress and the White House and they still can’t get anything of consequence accomplished. This is change we can believe in? This is the second coming, the end of business as usual? Another bill of goods has been sold by a graduate of the Ivy League.