A few days ago, I heard Obama exulting over the "landmark-health-care-reform" victory. His cigarette voice firm, sentences clipped and all terminated with the downward note of a skipper giving a heading to the helmsman. All of a sudden, an unmicrophoned voice from the audience shouted faintly, "What about the public option?" The big O didn't miss a beat, blamed it on Congress, "We couldn't get it passed in Congers". The audience member said something else and O replied, "You don't have to shout, young man."
A small incident admittedly, but gleaming with the shrapnel of exploding irony. Since polls show that most people want a some sort of socialized medical insurance system, wouldn't it kind of make sense for someone in an audience to shout? The whole health care performance was as hard to interpret as an Eric Romer movie dubbed into Old Norse. But if you believe Glenn Greenwald (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/) Obama and the Dems wanted to ditch de-privatizing the health insurance system all along.
The teabaggers make it all even harder to evaluate as they bark so hysterically. Don't you ever wonder why dogs go completely bonkers when you just innocently walk past their fenced in yard? Where's the proportionality? And why do their owners tolerate it? Or if they like it, why don't they just do their own barking? Why the intermediary? But back to insurance, if you believe the insurance gangsters got about what they wanted from their legally bribed politicians, you can admire the craftsmanship at least. They got about thirty million new customers and, better yet, customers who are legally obliged to buy. But they negotiated the mountain path of socialization so nicely, the wheels of their cart so close to the edge that dislodged pebbles could have provoked landslides. The question lingering in the air like an uncredited fart, how come we have to pay monopoly-jacked rates, huge profit margins, obscene compensation packages for something we could get for next to nothing under a system of public insurance?
Not that many people here get it that things are not as they seem. Obama couldn't turn out to be the typical psycho-killer oligarch-loving American president any more than Charlton Heston could play Goebbels. If his skin color doesn't prove this, just check out his enemies.
