The Day Utter Irrationality Led to the Right Conclusion

Federal District Judge Henry E. Hudson of Virginia may have called it right when he ruled the individual mandate provision of the new health care law unconstitutional.

He showed his true colors, however, when he went on to prate about "unbridled exercise of the federal police powers."  The SCOTUS Gang of Five, which is better at rewriting the Constitution than understanding it, will uphold Judge Hudson's verdict when the appeals process reaches them. They will also applaud Hudson's obiter dictum even as real Constitution scholars hold that he came to the right decision for the wrong reasons.

His fellow Republicans have been condemning what they call Obamacare for all the wrong reasons ever since the first House draft of the proposed legislation became public.  Why should they change now?

The fault is not in the stars but in ourselves, that we allowed our overlings to sell their souls and seal our fate.  The entire mess of pottage called health care reform cannot work without the requirement that everyone must buy insurance.  If that is unconstitutional, then the entire law falls apart.

This was inevitable from the very moment that Dr. Kidglove decided not even to try to enact the only true health care reform: government, single-payer health care for every single one of us.  Having thus capitulated to the devil, he then compounded his crime by giving up without a whimper the one compromise that might have produced a decent health care bill: the public option.

Like the committee seeking to build a horse and producing a camel, the Democratic geniuses in Congress came up with the individual mandate provision that has now been struck down. My fellow Merkins, we are  back where we started, stuck with the worst health care system of any nation outside of the Third World. 

David Leonhardt,  one of the lead whores in the New York Times's growing stable of corporate  propagandists, recently wrote that the opposition to health care "stems from the tension between two competing traditions in the American economy. One is the laissez-faire tradition that celebrates individuality and risk-taking. The other is the progressive tradition that says people have a right to a minimum standard of living — time off from work, education and the like.

"Both traditions have been crucial to creating the most prosperous economy and the largest middle class the world has ever known. Laissez-faire conservatism has helped make the United States a nation of entrepreneurs, while progressivism has helped make prosperity a mass-market phenomenon."

Where has this guy been for the last 20 years?  On the moon?

When Uncle Henry dies because he can't afford the surgery that could save his life, or the medicine that could prolong it, console his survivors by reminding them that he was part of "the largest middle class the world has ever known."

When Tiny Tim starves to death because Daddy got laid off by a firm that shipped his job overseas, and now his unemployement benefits have run out, reassure the grieving father about the greatness of American entrepreneurship.

David, take your mass-market phenomenon and shove it up your crass-market rectum.

We have opposition to real health care reform in this benighted land because (1) our electorate is  ignorant beyond compare and (2) the richest 2 per cent of us and the corporations they own are greedy beyond Midas. People -- real, breathing, bleeding, helpless, hapless, hurting, jobless,  hungry, foreclosed, debt-drowned, naive, trusting, clueless, deprived, deceived, powerless people -- aren't even on their radar.

Buy insurance stock, if your conscience allows you to profit from the misery of your fellow man.  You, too, can be part of the falsest prosperity , the most rapidly vanishing middle class in the history of the world.

And you won't be bothered by "federal police powers." 

Unless you're one of "them."  We  know who "they" are, don't we Judge Hudson? Tea Party People?  Dr. Kidglove?  They are us.