Basically, it’s rage. The whole thing is making me so mad that I can’t stand to follow the stories. Everytime I try to watch Rachel Maddow or listen to NPR I wind up turning them off ten minutes in because I get so angry I feel like my hair is on fire. So, instead of a reasoned blog about the current debacle, I’m offering the only thing I can: a list explaining why I’m too furious to blog properly.
1. Because of Obama’s obsessive, truly pathological inability to accept that, strange as it may seem, SOME PEOPLE WILL NOT BE CHARMED BY HIM.
2. Because of Obama’s resulting inability to stop trying to please Republicans and just get the damn bill passed by his MAJORITY party.
3. Because of the idiotic comments of people who believe that any chance of having some government option is somehow equivalent to ‘Russia’. HELLO! What is this, 1982? Russia is a raging capitalist chaos now, people.
4. Because American ideology of ‘freedom’ and ‘individuality’ is so tenacious that some people apparently think the Preamble to the Constitution contains an argument against affordable health care.
5. Because American exceptionalism so prominent in that ideology that, no matter how many times the statistics are bandied about, most people seem incapable of believing that we have the worst health care system among the industrialized nations.
6. Because so many people really seem to think that it is better to have exceptional medical care for a few than decent medical care for all, and have no problem saying so.
7. Because it is fucking heartbreaking to watch ordinary people, many of them lower-middle or working class, make impassioned statements that boil down to arguing that they should keep suffering so that insurance and pharmaceutical companies can keeping getting richer.
8. Because for about 5 seconds it seemed that, for once in my adult life, something in American might actually change for the better, and I can’t stand watching too closely as that possibility apparently goes down the tubes.
jke