Stop Dithering!

Mercedes hit-and-run driver
claims he didn’t see six foot
orange rabbit’s bright pedicab.

Quityergoddamnedithering, that’s what I say. I’m not talking about Afghanistan. I’m talking about health care. For Dick the Slimy to criticize Obama and his many advisors of dithering over Afghanistan is not only insulting, it betrays once more Cheney’s complete indifference to reality, rules, morality, and the deaths of our troops. Obama and his advisors are attempting to try to craft some way to gracefully get out of the incredible mess Cheney and his puppet, Bush, left them, and it is not an easy task. Someone said they are looking for an exit but can’t find it. I suspect this is true. By shifting our troops early on to Iraq (itself a terrible mistake) and neglecting Afghanistan (which Bush/Cheney shamefully did), they made matters much worse than they might have been. Now Obama and his advisors are trying to find a way to correct these horrendous mistakes (not an easy task) and Cheney (who has been wrong about literally everything and should not even be showing his face in public) should just shut up and hope he can disappear into the dustbin of history without being put in jail (where he clearly belongs). Carefully reviewing the complete situation and trying to find a decent solution cannot reasonably be seen as dithering. Of course Cheney would have just sent in more and more troops, forever, to make sure his buddies in the defense and oil industries continue to make their exorbitant profits from permanent “war.” What does he care if more and more of our young people die and keep on dying as long as profits are to be made. Not only is Cheney a blatant and unrepentant war criminal, he is also a chronic liar. How he continues to avoid accountability for his evil deeds I will never understand. To think Bill Clinton was impeached for lying, as Cheney’s record of lying goes unpunished, makes me want to weep. Whatever good Obama manages to do, and I think it will be quite a lot, I will never forgive him for letting Cheney avoid responsibility.

But when it comes to dithering, can there be any greater example than our President and Congress dithering for months over health care? It is perfectly obvious that the easiest, quickest, cheapest, most efficient system of health care we could have for all our citizens would be a single-payer system, basically medicare for all. This apparently was not even considered. It was taken off the table even before negotiations began. Now, if we are lucky, we are maybe, possibly, perhaps, going to get some kind of public option that would make insurance companies have to compete for customers. But even the public option is slowly being made into an impossible dream as it has been modified into a system that will have only a very small percentage of the population eligible, which means it will not have enough clout to really compete with the insurance giants. Of course as things are going we may end up with no public option at all, in which case there will be no meaningful change in our totally dysfunctional health care system. This vacillating, pussyfooting, wishy-washy, timorous approach to health care will get us exactly nowhere. Having failed for 60 years to pass a decent health care system it appears we may be on the brink of failing dismally once again. And why is this? It is because our political system, from the Executive Branch right on down, has become completely dysfunctional itself. Whereas the President and Congress are supposed to act in the public interest, they no longer do so. Corporations and big money rule – everything, including our Senators and Congresspersons. The very few elected officials that argue for a sane system that would benefit the people, like the late Ted Kennedy, Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders, are marginalized and even ridiculed as “socialists” by the bought and paid for morons they have to serve with, most of whom wouldn’t know socialism from a wart on their ass. What makes this worse is the fact that it is so blatantly obvious. Both Lieberman’s and Bayh’s wives, for example, are making big bucks from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. This is known. If Lieberman and Bayh claim this has nothing to do with their decisions they are lying. But even this pales in significance when compared with the money Baucus and others have taken from the corporations who want to kill health care. Most Americans want affordable and universal health care. The corporations and their whores in Congress do not. It’s unfortunately just that simple. I want universal health care in the form of a single-payer system like those that prevail in decent, moral, “civilized” cultures such as Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, and others (systems that are lied about and distorted constantly by those who want no such thing, who want to continue our broken system that provides them with their annual obscene profits that come from nothing but shuffling paperwork around and devising new schemes to rip us off). This is really what the dithering has been about, trying to create the impression of change without interfering with (and perhaps even improving) the profits of those who have been gaming the system for all these years. ” I’m mad as hell and…” what the hell can I do about it?

LKBIQ:
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Krishnamurti

TILT:
An estimated 2000 species of geckos is thought to exist and there are more to still be discovered.