"Just Shut Up For Now! Quit Bitching! We'll Fix It Later!"

The So-Called "Health Care Reform" Bill Was ALWAYS

Going to Be the SHITTIEST Possible "Compromise."

And whatever else happens, that is what we are going to end up with: the shittiest possible compromise. There is going to be a bill, let there be no doubt about that, so abandon hope that they'll just get disgusted, pack the whole thing in, and start over with Medicare for all. Nagahapun. We are going to get a shitty bill.

But we are also getting, if not the explicit promise, at least the rhetorical reassurance that, as bad as this bill may be, Congress can always (and assuredly WILL) come back to it and repair the more egregious faults "later." So, they tell us, accept this "piece of shit" bill as evidence of our good faith, and as a token of our earnest intention to further address this vital issue, they say. No, it doesn't have everything everybody wanted, right now. That was unpossible; but we can fix it. Later.

Which is fine. With one caveat: If we are to accept these assurances and reassurances, isn't it impingent upon those counseling that we be satisfied and await the return of the wheel, to answer one simple question:

Since the onset of the Raygun era, please name ONE major piece of social legislation which passed Congress under the caveat/promise that Congress would return to it, and "improve" it, but which just HAD to be passed in the shitty condition in which it was passed and signed, to which the Congress then later returned to "improve" it for the people?

Anybody?

One which SHOULD have been revisited and which at the time the Dims said they WOULD revisit, when they had the Congress back--but which wasn't, afaik--was the Bankruptcy Bill of '06, with which the Obamanable Sno-Job played all tricksy with his votes voting for cloture, against the bill on the floor. But there are others: NCLB, DOMA/DADT, FISA, PATRIOT, Clinton's Communications' Act of '96, the punitive "End-Of-Welfare," Partial Birth Abortions, etc...

It seems to me that folks who counsel quietude in the face of this catastrophic clusterfuck that this bill embodies, imploring taht because this is only the first step we should not oppose it, and that it will be revisited and improved, to provide relevant, contemporary examples of cases in which a truly shitty bill, being passed and signed, was later revisited and "improved--made more fair, more just--since the Bidness coup de etat in '80.

As Chris Floyd noted a couple of weeks ago, in this debate, one side is lying and the other side isn't telling the truth. The liars are the ones complaining that this health insurance reform initiative is equivalent to capitulation to Moscow and the assault on the Ancien Regime, while others are pretending it isn't a massive give-away to the CorpoRat State, with few or no restraints upon the private industry to maintain competition or hold down costs.