This Can't Be Happening!

My Fellow Americans.

I stand before you a chastened president. I made a mistake. Two mistakes really. (wild applause from Republican side)

I thought that Congress could do its job and through the deliberative process, produce a health care reform plan that would win broad support across the aisle and among all of you. But I’m afraid that I was wrong. Health care is an enormous industry—maybe the biggest and most powerful industry in the country—and it has far too much power in this capital. Literally thousands of lobbyists, carrying tens of billions of dollars in campaign contributions—have invaded these halls (and my house!) (relieved laughter)and distorted the process, and in the end have stymied reform. (some hissing)

Meanwhile, I have realized that the answer has been staring us in the face all along.

It is refreshing to hear the new head of the AFL-CIO, former mineworker and Mineworkers President Richard Trumka, get mad at sell-out Democrats and make a threat not to “support” them next year.

As Trumka pointed out in a talk to the Center for American Progress this week, for years, Democratic politicians, and the Democrats as a Party, have counted on the labor movement to get out the vote of its membership on Election Day, only to turn on workers after getting to Washington, on the issues that really matter, like jobs-killing free trade agreements, the gutting of bankruptcy law and credit law protections, and, most recently, the undermining of needed labor law reform.

Trumka, quoting from a famous Florence Reece song popularized by Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, said that going forward, Democrats will have to make it clear to labor “Which side are you on?”

But really, that’s only half the question.

The way I see it, President Obama has a couple of months to turn his failing administration around.

The war in Afghanistan is going south, and within a couple of weeks, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, Obama’s version of Lyndon Johnson’s General William Westmoreland, will be coming to him asking for more troops. Things are getting hairier in Iraq too.

His signature health care initiative is foundering, with Republicans working in lockstep to see to it that it fails.

President Barack Obama has staked his presidency on winning his “necessary” war in Afghanistan. Coming into office, one of his first acts, on Feb. 18, was to boost US troop levels in that country by 17,000, bringing the total number of soldiers and Marines in the country to about 57,000, to which one must also add 74,000 private contractors, most of them in the role normally handled by military personnel, and about 33,000 other soldiers from NATO countries and Australia. That’s 164,000 foreign soldiers fighting against Taliban fighters.

You see, here's the thing. When you hear about the sick, twisted things that America's torturers have been doing, courtesy of President George W. Bush and Vice President Darth Cheney, you have to remember that the US military and the CIA were not really all that reliable when it came to picking up the real terrorists. In fact, their batting average was pretty lousy.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Federal District Court Judge Fernando Gaitan of the Missouri Western District Court have at least two things in common: they are both appointees of President Ronald Reagan, and they both think it’s just fine for the US to execute innocent people. The same can be said for Judge C. Arlen Beam of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Let me state from the get-go that I'm no opponent of gun ownership (got my first rifle at the age of 12 and am still a crack shot). But something weird is going on when you have guys wandering around a political rally or protest site with pistols strapped to their thighs, or semi-automatic assault rifles strapped brazenly to their backs, as has been happening outside of venues where President Obama is speaking.

Before we get to the legal issues here, I just want to paint you a mental picture:

d678c2ks9x

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party, shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

Some critics have written, in response to my article calling for extension of the single-payer plan called Medicare to all Americans, that actually Medicare is a badly flawed program that leaves America's elderly without coverage for many important health services, and which requires them to pay for supplemental insurance, or to go on Medicaid, too.