And the more I think about it, the more pissed I get. My friend Rick called the other night, and we shared our misery.
After the government shutdown, people were finally beginning to see how destructive, how devoid of ideas, how bent on scapegoating the poor in order to keep succoring the rich, is today's teabagging Republican Party. It's as if the curtain of ignorance finally parted just a little, letting in enough light that some even were talking about Democrats taking back the House. Giving John "Tell me where to put my scrotum, now that it's empty, and I'll do it" Boehner something real to cry about.
Then comes the healthcare website rollout, and it's a disaster. Embarrassing. Inexcusable. Incompetent. So Rs are handed, like a head on a platter, a perfect rationale for resurrecting their pre-failed policies, an excuse for their selfish shortsightedness: see, they're saying. Democrats are incompetent. This is what we were trying to save you from.
Never mind that it's the first real attempt to address the myriad problems in our health care system; that it's based on actual concern for actual people who have no access to affordable health care, whose lives are ruined because of it. A fking website failure has wiped all that off the consciousness. It's tragedy, writ in the clouds.
Clearly, Obama wasn't lying when he said people could keep their plans if they liked them. He was wrong; he was overstating; he wasn't anticipating how insurers -- those socialist taker-overers of our health care system -- would try to screw it up, all innocent; but literally lying, i.e. saying something he knew was false, understanding that it'd be found out soon? No, obviously. Which doesn't make it any better.
For one thing, people who want to believe he's a liar will believe it. For another, it's just more fodder for the Foxifiers.
I like Barack Hussein Obama. (And I still believe it's more likely than not that, when the issues with the ACA are fixed, people will see it for the good thing it is [while we wait for the inevitable realization that single payer is the only and ultimate solution] and be glad for its existence in many ways.) I think his heart's been in the right place, and he's tried to do many of the right things, against an impossibly strong tide of dissembling, obstruction, and actual demonstrable lying on the other side. But this initial rollout has been beyond the pale, a straw on the back of an already gasping camel. It's really, really depressing; enough that I'm ready to give up.
Because it means the good guys, the people thinking beyond their narrowest of self-interest, the ones willing to help those in need because they realize it helps us all, the ones who value education, who think government has an essential role in seeing to it that we have a future, through research, through investing in our kids, our health care, our roads, those people are being shouted down by the selfish, the short-sighted, the hateful, the all-too-easily deceived into acting against their own and their children's interests by oligarchical manipulators.
It's all but unspeakable. In America, once a leader in all good things -- innovation and invention, education, promoting of equality (kicking and screaming, but still...) -- the tide has turned away from it all. As the US and the world are increasingly in need of people willing (and able) to see beyond the immediate, to not turn away from the difficult solutions to nearly impossible problems, the US is falling back into magical thinking, scapegoating, and willful ignorance. Electing people like Gohmert, Bachmann, Braun, Foxx, Cruz, Paul, Ryan, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Lionizing people like Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, Savage, Ingraham, Malkin, Carson, ad vomitum. Finding all manner of ways to justify doing nothing, spending nothing, learning nothing, hating everything. Because, in the end, that's who they are.
But then, who can blame them? Humans weren't designed for this. In the main, we're too flimsy of mind, too subject to whim, too easily fooled for times like these. Evolution needed a few more eons to get it right, but we fked it up too much, too soon, before that happened; or, if it's part of questionably intelligent design, the designer, undeniably, fell way short. Amateur hour up there. Humans. Best he/she/it/they could do?
America. Leading the way to the bottom. USA. USA. USA.
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