planting seeds

September 8, 2009. A day that shall live in infamy. The day Barack "Hoo-Sane" Obama brainwashed the collective mind of America's youth with his socialist agenda. Or maybe he just told them to work hard and stay in school. It's hard to make such distinctions these days.

Well one thing has become pretty clear in the past few weeks: the Republican strategy to defeat meaningful healthcare reform. It pretty much comes down to obstruct, obfuscate, mislead, and derail the process with scare tactics until anything that's going to be even marginally effective at actually solving problems is excised from the bill. And when that happens pretty much everyone's a winner; Democrats get to pass an utterly useless piece of legislation and celebrate that brave accomplishment and Republicans get to prevent meaningful reform from taking place. Everyone's a winner, that is, except the American people, specifically the middle class and working poor. But, then, no one's cared much about them in a long time.

The major remaining question whether an emasculated reform bill is actually worse than no reform at all. I say YES, YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES since it will give conservatives the opportunity to say, 10 years from now, "Hey look at what was done 10 years ago - that didn't work well at all. Let's not try anything like that again" and they'll be able to blame all of the ineffectiveness on the Democrats who gutted the bill in a futile attempt to woo a moderate Republican senator or two. In case anyone's keeping track, that's pretty much what happened with the climate bill earlier this year as well. Can't wait to see what Obama has to say about this mess tomorrow.