Obama and company are totally losing the war for healthcare reform. The griefers, birthers, deathers, and teabaggers have claimed the rhetorical high ground with ridiculous cries of SOCIALISM!!!!1 and toilet paper rationing, or that Obama’s legislation (!) will “pullin’ the plug on grandma!”.  It’s not a matter of facts, because in our culture, facts don’t matter. By nearly every metric, we don’t have the best healthcare in the world. It’s obvious that the healthcare industry, more interested in maintaining their margins than lowering our cost, are throwing thousands of lobbyists and a quarter of a billion dollars towards defeating reform. Fear is a helluva motivator – threating old, angry, uneducated, hard-working white people that at best, their tax money will provide brown people free insurance, and at worst, we will perform euthanasia.
It doesn’t even matter that the Quitta from Wasilla has miraculously transitioned from functionally illiterate populist to wonkish expert seemingly overnight. The debate is oft won by hacks and ideologes, not public policy wonks. Victory belongs to whomever shouts the best bumpersticker slogan, the most often, and the loudest.  Sadly, No! points the way:
Right now, there’s 37 countries ahead of us on the life expectancy list. And every goddamn one is full of people who are happy to watch a sport that always ends in a tie. I don’t know what major malfunction makes Republicans such crybabies that they’re afraid to man up against FUCKING SOCCER but real Americans like games where SOMEBODY ALWAYS WINS AND SOMEBODY ELSE ALWAYS LOSES. Sports that involve broken necks and bitten-off ears and concussions and knees that bend backwards at sickening angles. Real Americans are in it to win it and they know that being No. 38 in the biggest game of them all IS NOT FUCKING CUTTING IT.
So you can listen to Sarah Palin and Chuck Grassley and James Inhofe and Michelle Malkin and all the rest of the hapless assholes who are apparently content to be second-rate schmucks, just pleased as all hell to be the Washington fucking Generals of the world stage.
Or you can get on board with what America used to be about, what America still ought to be about and goddamit, what America’s gonna be about again pretty goddamn soon. They say we can’t. I say we can. They say we’re doomed to be frail little timid things that cave into death before a bunch of Europeans and Asians and even the fucking Canadians. I say that if we put our minds and our hearts into it, we can have it all and still come out the winner in this contest. I say we’re Americans, goddamit, and we can figure out how to drink and smoke whatever the hell we want and eat all the crappy food we want, and fuck and gamble and party and do tons of blow, and STILL look the Grim Reaper in the eye and tell that morbid douchebag to go fuck himself.
And if you’re a real American, I bet you think that too.
This is another example where winning is more important than being right.  We need to find a way to both win AND be right!
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, healthcare, reform, town halls
