1. "Moderate" congressional Democrats, out to kill health care reform because ... well, because it seems un-American, I guess (everyone in the world except Americans, by definition, are un-American; and everybody but Americans has access to reasonable government-provided health care, or to health insurance. Q.e.d: it's un-American!), seize now on abortion language, now on the public option, now on extending Medicare --which, of course, they are out to protect!--, now on the budget. Face it: Nelson, Lieberman, and their ilk are simply (1) stupid, if they believe what they say they believe (this apparently hits close to the mark in the case of Lieberman, who doesn't seem to know what he actually thinks), or (2) lying, like the guy who doesn't want to buy any magazine subscriptions but is too wimpy to just say so, and so hems and haws about details and so delays the kid, who really has no chance at all at this house, from going on to the next one.
The U.S. Congress is full of worthless hacks and should be done away with.
2. The President consulted a general, who (incredible surprise!) said he needed more troops. And as soon as a general says it, it is sacred writ. I'm trying to remember the last time a general (not Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney, who never went near a war) said that fewer troops would be the way to go.
Now we have a strategy that cannot be explained without resort to metaphor.
3. Goldman Sachs needed not only lots of government money (briefly); it needed preferential access to H1N1 flu vaccine. It got both, and now it turns its very patrician nose up at the country and the government, plotting to make its next killing on carbon trading or new financial derivatives that shouldn't be regulated because that would interfere with the "market." This behavior is not exactly a surprise, as most of the government's financial regulators seem mysteriously to have come from Goldman Sachs and so the guys in the five thousand-dollar suits feel protected, with justification.
But while millions remain unemployed and Wall Street has enjoyed a huge year, what I want to know is, where are the mobs that should be tearing apart those marble columns in lower Manhattan and yanking these guys out of their limos for a little tarring and feathering? Americans like to complain. From the comfort of their recliners in front of wide-screen flat panel televisions. We may have screwed everything up; but at least, when our lives were threatened, the generation of the sixties raised a little hell in the streets. The kids today moan into their chai tea that there are no jobs; then they take their advanced degrees and sweep up before closing. They are willing to smoke grass, but not to cause trouble --looks bad on the resume.
At least we waited until our thirties and forties to sell out.
There is a lot more FOP out there, pretty much everywhere I look. Don't even get me started on Mayor Daley's cash cow (the public assets of the citizens of Chicago).
But I am dispirited, for now.
