Obama initiative finally achieves climax!

I have to write about the health care bill.

Because unless I do, Obi’s picture will stay at the top of this page and I won’t be able to bear to visit it. And it’s my own page for Christ’s sake.

While The Missus and I walk around like the living dead because we failed then bailed on our dog, The Boy has a peculiarly devil-may-care attitude about Obi’s absence. The Missus remarked to me this evening that The Boy had asked her about Obi three times since yesterday. I could tell it was taking a toll on her. Then after that, sitting together with The Boy on the couch, he looked at me with almost a smirk and asked “When is Obi coming back?” Then observed me closely, clearly looking for a big reaction. I told him to knock it off and that it wasn’t funny.

What the fuck is up with that? I hope his lack of missing the dog is a result of the basically adversarial nature of their relationship. Obi was almost always bumping into, brushing against and occasionally scratching The Boy, but never once went psycho on him. He seemed to understand that in this pack, turning on The Boy would have been an unresolvable tactical error.

And the house is still filled with empty spaces and missing rituals. Even shitty rituals like locking him in his steel cage every night are missed, in spite of the fact that at the time, it made me feel more like a warden than a pet owner.

But as usual, I digress. This post is meant to turn a page… at least get Obi’s mug shot “below the fold,” as it were.

I don’t know anything about the health care bill that was just passed. If it’s not my issue (inflated valuation of the back-issue comic book market), I’m not really a big detail man. But in this case, I wanted to know more, so I switched around to all the cable news channels. Even MSNBC had broken away from their usual weekend fare of what might as well be called The Tragedy Channel. Usually true-crime shit, Life In Lock-up, that sort of thing. MSNBC has made good on Andy Warhol’s 15-minutes-of-fame promise for the American prison population. Their weekend lineup usually makes The History Channel’s programming look like a warm summer afternoon on the porch with Mr. Rogers, but even they broke in with the news when the House finally voted tonight.

And the thing I hear missing from all the coverage—remember, not a detail guy—what I hear missing among all the rebukes about how Obama had to (sigh) “ram through” the legislation without a single Republican vote, and how in the past, such social legislation always garnered bipartisan support. Even LBJ picked up a few Republicans on his way to the passage of his civil rights legislation, every channel reminds me.

Then they ask, what’s wrong with Obama? How did he fail to gather even a single Republican vote?

Simple. When other landmark human rights legislation was being passed, there were statesmen in the opposition party (always the Conservatives, by the way, standing in the way of what later becomes landmark civil rights legislation). Men and women of principle over politics. The difference is, this time none surfaced.

Moreover, I reject the premise of the question itself. What I hear missing is anybody in the mainstream media asking, “Why is this generation of Republican lawmakers such a bunch of lock-stepping party-liners?” That’s the real outrage. That, and the fact that Obama wasted an entire year on hopeless attempts at bipartisanship with such an entrenched, unyielding opposition. That first year of a President’s administration is a real valuable commodity, and to have squandered most of it on such a blatantly futile attempt as bipartisanship with this current crop of Republican Congresspeople, well, I think that’s an outrage too. I don’t think there’s been true bipartisanship in Washington since Bill Clinton and Trent Lott were secretly cutting deals in the middle of the night. And even that had to be done under the cover of darkness.

Now the GOP incumbents are in the unenviable position of having to hope that the government’s public health initiative fails. It’s like praying your own team loses the big homecoming game because you put all your money on the other side. It’s dirty pool and they’re going to come off as worse than poor losers. They’re betting on Americans, their own constituents, to lose.

It’s the textbook definition of “anti-American.” It’s anti-us.

If these Republican legislators want to run on health care later this year, that is absolutely the way the Democrats need to frame the debate. It’s a winnable argument in no small part because it is a true argument. The GOP has already promised that if this bill (or any variation thereof) passed, they would run against it in November.

I hope that’s an oath they plan to keep.