This is not prize fight. There are no split decisions, no ties, with a few points to determine the winner. This is a war…Spartans versus Persians….the Free World versus the Nazis and the Fascists….the American Colonies versus the British monarchy. Win and gain our freedom or lose and die. Because, if we lose, some of us will surely die.
The big guns are trained on us. The sickest, worst, most reprehensible aspect of the Washington political society are coming out. In one case a Senator is being pressured not just by two former staffers, but his two former chiefs of staff. They will sell themselves to anyone it appears. Michael Burgess, apparently some kind of MD, not realizing apparently that there are millions of us who were not surprised that we could get the grades to go to medical school and who chose not to, tries to make the medical issue something between brahmins and the great unwashed. Well, Representative Burgess, some of knew Greek before we had to use it for anatomy class. We, therefore, also understand logic and know when a swindle is being perpetrated or when a House member, using his degree to mask his intentions, is a sell-out to the health care industry.
We understand and sympathize with people who cannot perceive that they are being sold down the river by their House or Senate members on the Republican side, although more and more people are beginning to get it. The South, however, probably won’t recover any time soon. Alabama has a clearly racist Senator. What does that tell you about Alabamans? Congress denied him a federal judgeship because he apparently, among other things, liked to call black men “boy.” But Alabamans elected him to the House and now the Senate. They are looking backward instead of forward. They are trapped in ignorance. They do not want to know that they are being sold down the river by their own Senator to the health care lobby. Why would they think that a person such as this would do otherwise?
But there is no reason for people from San Francisco to tolerate Diane Feinstein. Married to a hugely wealthy man, apparently totally out of touch, she still parades herself around as a Liberal. If she is a Liberal, she should not be influenced by her husband or the health care lobby. There is no reason for people from Arkansas, who liberated themselves from the past with the Clintons, to be deprived of health care by a Senator with connections to the health care lobby. People from Arkansas, like Midwesterners, are very practical. They held their noses and voted for Clinton, and he got the home-boy vote and won. But then they kicked him out. And that was when they realized that they had made a mistake. And so they not only re-elected him, but they started to really think for themselves and stopped thinking as if it were 1899. Arkansas is still a poor state, and they need a Democrat. But those poor people need good health care even more. Good health care, not just any health care. And they are going to get it, but they need to tell their female Senator that they will chauvinistically send her back to the kitchen if she does not vote for a public health care option. The public option says that you get health care that is at least as good as Medicare, which is very good, whether you can afford it or not. And it can’t be taken away, whether you lose your job or get cancer or move from Arkansas to Texas or Alaska.
This is what America is about. Taking care of our people. For God’s sake, how many Americans donate money, food and their valuable time to charitable organizations both here in the United States and around the world. The best thing about religious organizations is that when it is necessary they can stop telling people what to do or what to believe and just pack up and hit the road for New Orleans after a disaster and set up kitchens to feed people, or build shelters for people to stay in or help move people. We are the most benevolent country in the world, probably after the Scandinavians. It is not boasting when it is the truth. We have all had our ups and downs or one of our relatives has. That means everyone. North, south east and west. Our generosity knows no bounds. And thank God it doesn’t because our government, and some major corporations, have done some real damage around the world from time to time.
So why do we let Democratic Senators Lincoln, Feinstein, Bayh, Nelson from Nebraska, Nelson from Florida, Hagan, Bennet, Baucus, Conrad, Carper, Landrieu and Wyden get away with this. There are no questions. Cost–done. Access–done. Method of delivery–done. Amount of care–Done. Premiums and taxes to pay for costs–done. What is not done is the lobbying of 300 additional former Congressional staffers who have become mercenaries for the health care lobbyists. As if 600, that’s right, 600 lobbyists for every member of Congress were not enough, the organized, vicious, greedy, unrelenting heath care lobby added these “connected” lobbyists and $1.4 million PER DAY to try to defeat a public health care option. Now why do you think that they would do that and from whom do you think they are going to get that money back if they win. It is going to come out of your hide. We have to finally make these Senators more afraid of the public than they are of this lying, sleazy health care industry.
Too strong? Let me repeat: $1.4 million dollars and the salaries of 300 people who were supposedly working for people who at one time were on your side who will insure that you do not get health care in return for their 30 pieces of silver. Money that will see kids with cancer go undiagnosed until it is too late. Money that will go to make sure that the father who works 50 hours a week to feed his family is denied health care because he becomes a health risk. Money that will deny health care to those who are laid off and can’t afford COBRA…how many of those are there these days. Middle class families…literally hundreds of thousands of them…not some isolated incident…BANKRUPTED not by overspending but by some major health care crisis that overwhelmed them or the limited insurance they could afford.
This is beyond serious, folks. This is a war. And in previous posts we have given the Emails and the phone numbers of the traitors who could easily put health care in your pocket. Instead they are siding with the enemy. Get on the phone. Go to their web sites. You don’t have to be from their states. You’re a citizen of this country. It is YOUR MONEY they spend. Tell them you want to spend a fraction of that money, some of what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney gave to the rich in tax cuts and to Iraqis in rebuilding a country that they decided foolishly to devastate. Remember this, even though health care will not cost anything in the long run…nothing, even the exaggerated amounts put out there by all the criminally false statements of the health care industry and the Republicans would be paid for until about 2050 from the amounts we spent on the Iraq war. After, of course, the uncountable losses in lives and wounded.
Part two to follow.