First off. . . holy hell, has Osama bin Laden really been dead for a whole month? I guess time flies when you’re having fun.

Or maybe I should start calling him Usama bin Laden again? Fox News certainly has, and I found that a bit odd. I mean, for years the government (especially the FBI and the CIA) referred to him as Usama bin Laden, and often truncated that to just “UBL” for short. And then after 9/11, we all just agreed to call him Osama, though it would take another year or two for us to decide how to spell al-Qaeda. But now, immediately after his death, Fox (and only Fox) went back to Usama.

I actually prefer the FBI’s spelling, since in my mind he will always by UBL. But I have to wonder why Fox, the network that practically invented and most definitely mainstreamed the classic Obama/Osama verbal swap, is suddenly going with the alternate spelling. Maybe they were afraid their frothing blowhards and fanatically unserious Serious People wouldn’t be able to get through a whole story without conflating the names a dozen times. Perhaps changing the spelling and pronunciation was a way to make it easier for the Life Support Systems For Hair (Shep Smith excluded) that dominate their broadcast day.

So, mental time capsuling and grammatical conspiracy theories not withstanding, I suppose it’s time to spend a few embarrassing and loathsome minutes talking about the 2012 GOP field. And before you suggest that words like embarrassing or loathsome are poisoning the well, I might direct you to the Pew Poll recently conducted that asked respondents to come up with a single word that best described their impression of the candidates running for the Republican nomination.

First, let me get the personal grievances out of the way. I’d say that the most embarrassing thing on this list is that “not good” is two words, but the fact that some people chose the word “republican” to describe Republican candidates for President should tell you most of what you need to know about our electorate. I am a bit unclear on why “disappointed” is flagged as a neutral comment, other than perhaps as a balancing concession (and it should be noted that “disappointed” is the most popular of all the supposedly neutral responses).

So nit-picking not withstanding, this is where we are, folks. Most of the flakes, fakers and phonies have finally worn out their media welcomes. Donald Trump, who in his own head would never want to run for the office of the President because he is convinced that the office of The Donald is already a step or two above god, has finally gone back to being a hack-ass reality television star. Mitch Daniels, who was the most serious candidate that no one knew about, had the common sense to not run. Chris Christie, who ran for Governor for the specific purpose of building an asinine conservative-friendly executive record and assured us the other month that he could easily beat Obama, is also not going to run.

Newt Gingrich entered the race, promptly set his own hair on fire by telling the truth (which didn’t make sense because that’s clearly not Newt’s strong suit), and then invited the entire D.C. punditocracy to take turns putting that fire out by punching him in the head. He is a victim of the nasty, backstabbing culture he helped create in Washington, and his abject failures couldn’t have happened to a slimier guy. What’s sad is that in this weak field, his complete implosion still doesn’t put him completely out of the running.

Herman Cain is the new Donald Trump. That’s all.

Michele Bachman is the old Michele Bachman. That’s also all.

And of course, there is Sarah Palin. There is always Sarah Palin, isn’t there? Hell, I’ve typed that name so many times that the keystrokes themselves almost feel familiar, and there’s a good chance that if you’re reading my blog right now, it’s because of Sarah Palin in the first place. Apparently she’s on some kind of supporter funded vacation that is in no way a campaign tour, despite having strumpeted her Totally Not A Tour Bus up in so much jingoistic schlock that the exhaust fumes actually spell out Joe McCarthy in cartoon bubble letters when the engine starts up.

I’ve never believed she actually has the drive or the determination to run for President, at least not on a major party ticket. I’m open to the possibility of her running as a Tea Party candidate spoiler, but I think even she realizes that if she Nader’ed a Presidential election she’d lose some of her loyal followers. So no, I don’t thinks he will run for President, and while I’m perfectly happy to be wrong (dear god, let that woman run), I don’t think I am.

I think she’d run for Vice President again, though. Because I think she thinks she could beat Biden this time around. And she’s always more than happy to let someone else do a bunch of work for her while she smiles and takes all the publicity. Just ask the organizers of Rolling Thunder. She also loves having someone else to blame for her failures. And I think that a guy like, say, Mitt Romney, who has a decent chance at winning the primary only because everyone else’s chances also suck, would happily hitch his hopes to the horrific harpy if he thought it would put him in the White House. So don’t be stunned if, a  year from now, we’re all looking at Romney/Palin stickers. It really wouldn’t be much different than the McCain/Palin stickers. Or the McCain/Palin campaign, really.

And Romney is finally positioning himself, playing on the only aspects of his personality that appeal to his base. Basically his campaign boils down to “I’m A Really Rich Guy And I Have Presidenting Hair“. Which, when you think about it, is twice as much as Reagan had to run on. Of course, Romney will never be Reagan, no matter how much he’s going to have to sniff The Gipper’s crap and declare it to be chocolate over the next year or so. And Romney is maneuverable, absurdly flexible, and actually much smarter than the dolt he plays on television. So no, I don’t think RomneyCare or his infinite flip-floppery will keep him from the nomination. It’s much more likely that his religion will. That and he’s a creepy little freak.

And finally Tim Pawlenty. Tim Pawlenty. Maybe if I just type his name over and over I’ll remember anything about him. Other than the fact that he calls himself T-Paw with a straight face (hell, the guy probably has sex with a straight face) and is so bad at attack politics that he practically called himself a doofus without meaning to. Actually, the best thing he has to run on is that no one really remembers anything about him. Maybe that’s his plan, hoping that voters will get into the ballot box and be so disgusted with everyone else that they’ll vote for that Tim Paw-Something guy that they’ve heard mentioned on television.

But in spite of his charisma deficiency, it’s important to note that Tim Pawlenty (jeez, I can’t even spell his name without forgetting what I’m typing) is a short sighted bullet point generating idiot. And to prove my point, here are his brilliant thoughts on how to reform (and by reform I mean eradicate) Medicare. “It will include something called performance pay. We will begin to move providers from getting paid not just for the volume of procedures they crank out, but whether people are actually getting healthier and getting better.”

Now, any of you out there that are actual medical professionals are probably extracting your fists from your computer monitors right now, but I’ll explain the problem for those of you that aren’t already frothing at the mouth. The very reason that Medicare is both so expensive and so necessary is that it universally covers people at an age where no other insurance carrier would want them enrolled. At an age when medical costs skyrocket and when injuries and illnesses become more common, more dangerous, and infinitely more complex.

Any system that “rewards success” by its very nature punishes failure. A “performance pay” Medicare system would force providers to question what impact certain procedures and even certain patients will have on their success rate. That sure does sound a whole freaking lot like “putting government bureaucrats between people and their doctors” to me. Which, of course, is incredibly bad.

Unless a Republican does it.

I knew, deep down, that not a whole day would go by before the death of Osama bin Laden became incorporated into the bullshit kabuki theater that is American politics. It crossed my mind less than an hour after I heard the news, because that’s where my brain lives. But I was willing to just let the whole thing skate and wait for the right to politicize the shit out of it. Somehow, they still think they own 9/11 and all of its political proceeds. I expect a cease and desist order from Rudy Giuliani just for mentioning the date in print.

And while there are times that I wish Obama was a more confrontational politician, it’s times like these that I’m glad he relies so heavily on the rope-a-dope. It helps, of course, that his political rivals long since rode the train all the way to Dope City. His speech about the death of bin Laden was so politically neutral, so meticulously groomed. And the reaction from the foaming-mouth right was so immediate and vulgar.

They are already demanding to see the body, or photographs of the body, or some other evidence other than the word of the President and the entire United States military that bin Laden is dead. I imagine in about six months they’ll be asking for his Long Form Death Certificate and then analyzing the resulting PDF with the sort of scrutiny normally reserved for the Zapruder film and all of the technical knowledge of, well. . . a typical teabagger, actually. Sorry fellas, but you are the stereotype now.

Call me cagey, but I now wonder if the release of Obama’s Long Form Birth Certificate wasn’t a carefully timed political maneuver, designed to draw attention to the stark contrast between the GOP’s focus and Obama’s own. And it’d be crass, if the entire birther issue weren’t more than just unscheduled racism and character assassination in the first place.

And what a contrast it is, too. It’s a subconscious gut check about each group’s priorities, and as political theater (if that’s what it really is) it works wonderfully. Plus, Obama gets to be casual and take none of the actual credit for the contrast, which leaves the right’s feverish wailing that he is taking credit for the kill (and not even in a flight suit, for frig’s sake) sounding all the more hollow. Like I said, the guy knows how to work the rope-a-dope.

As for the Republicans who are now howling that he didn’t give George Bush enough credit for helping to hunt down bin Laden? You guys probably want to let that one slide. Just let it go. I know you have the built-in burning fury to piss and moan on everything that your side doesn’t get the credit for, but this one is a losing battle.

Because I will bury your asses with 2002 videos of George W. Bush feeling “not that concerned” about bin Laden’s whereabouts, followed swiftly by reminders of the CIA closing down the unit dedicated to hunting bin Laden in 2006.

I guess rope-a-dope isn’t my style. I prefer the one-two punch.

What I find most telling about the Ryan budget isn’t its built-in loathing of the very government it seeks to reform. That’s not exactly news coming from a conservative. More so, it’s the way they are trying to sell it to seniors. On every talk show, in every sound bite, and at ever town hall I see, Republican Congressmen and shills alike are scarcely able to open their mouths before pointing out that none of the changes will affect people over the age of fifty-five (which, itself, is only partly true). They then look on with universally stunned expressions when their older constituents tell them that’s still unacceptable.

Some of them even repeat the point. They assure them that their benefits won’t be changing. Just the ones for their kids and grandkids, as if that suddenly makes it okay. In their tiny little hearts, which must be colder than Ayn Rand’s vagina, they assume that their, “I got mine, fuck all y’all!” outlook on life is truly universal.

And for those of us who actually are under fifty-five, it’s not exactly a selling point. They’re telling us that this plan is so good, they wouldn’t dare try to give it to anyone who already has proper Medicare. And they can twist and spin and sputter and half-truth all they want, but the Ryan plan for Medicare is a bloody voucher plan. It’s inherently similar to the Republican solution for any government-run organization. Instead of spending taxpayer money to get a job done, they’d rather hand our money back to us (mostly) and tell us to go out and individually purchase insurance. That hard-line economic conservatives would be inherently opposed to collective bargaining isn’t a surprise, really. It’s just obnoxious and dangerously misplaced.

But it’s the same song and dance for every program. Education? Social Security? Let every individual fend for themselves in the private market. Oh, and while we’re at it? Completely deregulate those markets just to make sure that consumers can’t get a fair shake. Hell, even the military is slowly being privatized, and at great cost to both the taxpayers that fund it and any innocent civilians that happen to be swarthy looking in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail.

It’s one of those things that we’ve just come to accept in America. That the entire country, hell, the entire world lurched towards complete financial meltdown a few years ago, and apparently it was no one’s fault. No blame was placed (can’t play the blame game), no responsibility was shouldered, no one was prosecuted or even really investigated. It was a collective fraud on a scale too massive and too diffuse for most people to contemplate. But still. Nobody went to jail.

And it’s not like there’s no evidence. Banks were taking junk assets, wrapping them up in a pretty bow and selling them off as good investments. Investments that got passed around like a jacket flask at a senior prom. Everyone traded them and re-traded them, everyone gave them completely bogus ratings, all pretending that they were anything but a steaming bag of bullshit. And no one went to jail for that.

It was recently revealed that Bank of America was intentionally manipulating people’s mortgages to cause them to default. Then they were demanding that their borrowers buy insurance to cover the bank’s liability (from a company either owned by or partnered with BofA). And if their customers couldn’t shoulder the increased burden? Oh well. Free house for the bank. And no one’s going to go to jail for that shit, either. Mark my words.

Now, most of that information came out because of stolen emails. So the government suddenly has a bug up its ass about “cyber security” (someone needs to tell them that no one uses the word “cyber” anymore). But if you’re going to go after the hackers that stole the email, you damn sure better go after the banks that stole people’s homes right out from under them. But they won’t. Someone needs to tell these idiots that there’s no point in making the trains run on time if no one can afford to buy a ticket.

Just about the only guy that went to jail for any of this is Bernie Madoff. And fine, lock the crook up. I don’t disagree. But don’t tell me that was some honest pursuit of justice. Madoff committed the one immutable sin in this world. He stole from the rich. You don’t do that, see. You don’t dick over the folks holding the reigns. Single moms, the elderly, brand new homeowners? Sure, take them to the cleaners. Bleed ‘em dry. But you go after other rich folks and the hammer comes down.

Am I the only one that’s sick and tired of this bullshit? Am I the only person who gets a little vomit backed up in my throat when I see a CEO wearing a suit that costs more than most of his employees clear in a month get up in front of a microphone and talk about impending layoffs? That’s usually right after I’m told that those same CEOs should be running the country because they know a lot about creating jobs. No, they don’t. They know about creating profit. And any decent CEO will tell you that unless your company is already highly profitable, the best way to create profit is to cut jobs. Lay off the pleebs, ship their jobs overseas, and watch that stock price climb, baby.

And for that matter, am I the only person who can actually hear the fabric of the universe tearing whenever one of these Ayn Rand fellating jackoffs says that lowering tax rates will spurn job growth? Really? We’ve had the second lowest tax rate this country has ever seen for over a decade now. Where are the fucking jobs? No one ever asks them that. Not the timid, limp-dick quasi-liberals debating them. Not the journalists who have long since abdicated their responsibility to reality and turned into daytime talk show hosts with over-inflated senses of self worth. Somehow it never actually comes up. Funny, that.

These are the same guys that tell us that we all have to give up some of our Social Security benefits because they borrowed from the fund to pay for other things. That’s one of those tidbits that hardly ever gets mentioned. If you spend an entire day listening to all of these Very Serious Cocksuckers, you’d think that Social Security wasn’t able to cover its own costs. Bullshit. In fact, the program has run a surplus for years. It’s so successful that the government routinely raids the fund to pay for other crap they want to spend money on. Usually tax cuts for the upper 1%. Instead, they leave a great big honking IOU where our retirement money should be. And then they make their Very Serious Cocksucker Faces and tell us that we’re just going to have to retire on less because all of the money is gone. And most journalists report that as fact because, well, most journalists are dumber than a box of hair.

Look, kids. I know I’ve been MIA for a while. And the truth is I spent the winter hibernating, stewing in my own juices. I did the very thing I rail against. I let the bastiches burn me out.

It won’t happen again.

Today I’m going to talk about something a bit different. The musings on DRM and cheap shots at Sarah Palin will have to wait a day (neither are going anywhere). Today I want to tell you about a man named Coleman Bean. Bean served two tours in Iraq, the first of which was during the actual invasion in 2003. His second tour came several years later, after he’d been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Unfortunately, he’d been shifted out of the Army proper and into the Individual Ready Reserve. Soldiers in the IRR can be “called up” under limited Presidential authority, and that authority was used extensively to meet troop demands during operations in Iraq. But because they are not on active duty (they do not drill, train or receive pay), neither the Department of Defense nor the Department of Veterans Affairs saw Coleman as their responsibility.

Bean returned to Iraq in the summer of 2007. He came home eight months later with Sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve. But his PTSD resurfaced shortly thereafter, and he encountered continuing difficulty receiving treatment. Appointments he made with the VA were perpetually postponed and delayed. He continued to suffer from severe anxiety and nightmares without any treatment. On September 6th, 2008 Coleman Bean took his own life.

This year a bill was introduced in the House by Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) after he was made aware of Coleman Bean’s heartbreaking story. Titled the Sgt. Coleman S. Bean Individual Ready Reserve Suicide Prevention Act of 2010, the law moved through the House and was introduced in the Senate by New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg. Everything was on schedule and its passage was seen as all but certain, right up until last week. The provision was stripped from the Defense Appropriations Act by Arizona Senator John McCain. Despite pleas from Congressman Holt, McCain refuses to remove the hold.

In fact, Holt called McCain directly. And in a moment of political arrogance, McCain asserted that he was killing the provision because no one in Arizona needed the bill. It’s not true, of course. There are over a hundred thousand men and women currently in the IRR, and yes, many of them are from Arizona. But even if it were true, it would be a shameful and callous comment to make. Does John McCain think that the life of a New Jersey soldier is some how less important or less valuable than the life of one from his home state?

McCain not only voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, but he has been a vocal proponent of the war both from his seat in the Senate and while on the campaign trail in 2008. As the ranking member on the United States Senate Armed Services Committee and a combat veteran himself, few members of the Senate should be more aware of the responsibility that the government has to its soldiers. He knows damn well that that responsibility doesn’t begin and end at his own state’s borders. The Senator’s response was not only a dodge, it was insulting and cruel.

But more to the point, it showed McCain’s ignorance. Our system simply fails to take responsibility for soldiers who are part of the Individual Ready Reserve. In fact, US General Accounting Office sited this as an issue as far back as 2003. Yet over 25,000 soldiers have been mobilized from this pool of soldiers by the Army alone during the War on Terror, and most of them fill vital leadership and command roles. And the military has repeatedly acknowledged that military suicide rates have increased despite efforts to understand and combat them.

McCain hasn’t even given a reason (a real reason) for placing the hold on Holt’s provision. Is it budget squabbling? I’m sure this is one bill the American taxpayers are proud to pay. Is it partisan pettiness? And if so, exactly how many ruined lives are the proper toll for Holt not having an (R) at the end of his name? His only given rationale was dismissive and smug – unbecoming of any elected representative, but especially of a senior member of the Senate.

John McCain’s Washington Office:
241 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Main: (202) 224-2235
Fax: (202) 228-2862

So, Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat went to a fairly unknown Republican named Scott Brown. That’s what everyone is jabbering about, so I figure I might as well chime in. Now, to be fair, there were lots of reasons that Brown won that seat. The first is that he is an excellent campaigner. No doubt about it. He assimilated a lot of what worked for the Democrats in the past few election cycles, learned from it, even improved on it to a point, and then applied that same strategy to what most people thought was an impossible race. Keep in mind, however, that most people thought that some of the Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008 were impossible as well.

Scott Brown also won because Martha Coakley was a mediocre candidate who ran a shit-tastic campaign. She assumed that Massachusetts would never put a Republican in Teddy’s old chair, so she didn’t have to try that hard. And what she did try, she hosed up pretty thoroughly. She had a sloppy work ethic, an utter lack of charisma or even feigned enthusiasm for the race, and honestly? Her organization seems like it was being run by a pack of narcoleptics on an opium bender. I’ve clipped my toenails with more vigor and verve than this woman ran for the United States Senate.

So while I don’t much agree with Brown’s positions, I’m not surprised that he won. Would I rather a Democrat take that seat? Sure. Am I glad Coakley, specifically, got her ass handed to her? You bet I am. She deserved it, and it will hopefully serve as a wake-up call for complacent Democrats who think that their base will infinitely elect them simply because there’s a (D) at the end of their name. On the up side, Brown has to run for re-election in just two short years, so there will be a chance to get a competent challenger into the race then.

Now, as for this whole “No More Super Majority” sky-is-falling bullshit that I keep seeing from every pundit and reporter in the free world? I’d really like to know just what in the hell they’re talking about. The Democrats never had a supermajority in the Senate. Ever. Even if you, for some reason, count the “Blue Dogs” like Nelson and Bayh? That still only gets the Democrats to 58. Bernie Sanders makes 59, though he’s pretty left of center. So I’ll give them that one. But magical mister sixty? Why, that would be Joe Lieberman.

When the critical vote in your supermajority Senate is a guy that got primaried out of your own party, gave a speech at the opposition party’s National Convention, and spent almost the full eight years sniffing George Bush’s shit and telling him it didn’t stink? That’s not a fucking supermajority. That’s 59 Senators and one adversary. I don’t care what party he claims to officially caucus with – Joe Lieberman was the sixtieth Democrat in the same way that Yoko Ono was the fifth Beatle. The absurd difficulty that the Senate had passing health care reform alone should be proof that whatever the Democrats have, it sure as hell wasn’t and isn’t a supermajority.

But you know who else didn’t have a supermajority? The Republicans under Bush. Nope. Never had it. They couldn’t force a cloture vote on anything without help from at least a few Democratic Senators. And yet that didn’t stop them from hammering out eight long years of the shittiest governance in American history. And the reason it didn’t stop them is that the Democratic minority lacked the sack to ever dare to filibuster the Republicans – on anything. And I’m not just talking about the September 12th Senate or the Recently Bitchslapped At The Polls 2003 Senate. Even in 2006, when the Democrats were obviously riding a wave of George Bush fueled populist outrage, they refused to stand the hell up.

I’ve always given the Republicans credit for sheer brass ball-ism and their uncanny ability to get things done. And this Republican Congress is no exception. Though I guess right now it’s their uncanny ability to not get things done that deserves damning praise. Because their basic position is that they will filibuster everything the Democrats throw at them unless they receive their concessions and are allowed to pollute, water down and otherwise piss on the legislation. And, of course, once they monkey wrench up the bill, they vote against it anyway. That’s some chutzpa, friend. But the Democrats let them get away with it, and that’s where the blame should fall.

So maybe, in the end, losing the false mantle of supermajority won’t really matter all that much. The Democrats still won’t get anything significant done. They’ll still piss away their basic majority (even with the Blue Dogs in play, the Democrats can manage the basic fifty votes for just about anything on their agenda). And the public might be able to go an entire week without having to hear from Joe Fucking Lieberman and his magical sixtieth vote.

Ultimately, the Brown victory should be a wake-up call for more than just fickle campaigners and smug partisans. It should be a clear message to all Senate Democrats that it’s time for them to take off the kiddie gloves and realize that the GOP will oppose anything and everything they want to accomplish (and often after screwing it up in committee). It’s high past time to replace Reid with a competent, steely-toothed majority leader who’s willing to let the Republicans filibuster if they so threaten. Parade them in front of the American voters. Shame them if need be. But start actually using the power that those voters gave to you, or they damn sure will take it away again.

The year was 2005, and George W. Bush had just won his first majority in a Presidential election ever. And with his 2% win over John Kerry, Bush strutted out in front of the media explaining that he now had political capital, and that he was damn sure going to spend it. Everyone with a capital R within ten city blocks of their name went on television to describe his 2% win as a mandate, Jeff Gannon jokes be damned.

Bush decided that it was time to take care of a pesky little problem that has rankled fiscal conservatives in America for over half a century. And so the President embarked on a cross-country speaking tour in order to convince people that the best way to fix Social Security was to break it up into hundreds of millions of private investment accounts. That way their money could be individually invested – because if there’s any money trading hands anywhere in the world, Wall Street believes it deserves a cut. It was the first salvo in the hard line right wing dream of finally dismantling that damned infernal socialist New Deal that Roosevelt had put in place during the late thirties and early forties.

It took them almost seventy years to gather up the cajones to go after Social Security outright (long since branded as the “third rail” of American politics). And when they finally tried, they did so with their mandate President and their complacent press and their noise machine so overbearingly influential that it actually convinced people that a Vietnam War veteran knew less about military action than a Champagne Squadron AWOLer. They had proven that they could fool enough of the people enough of the time. They had their mandate. They had the attention of a still panicky nation. They were the thin red line between order and terrorist anarchy!

And they got their asses kicked over it. The attempt to gut Social Security was the first major, public defeat for the Bush Administration. So here the GOP was, so far out from the inception of the program that no one who helped to craft it was still alive, and they couldn’t even put so much as a dent in it.

But if you want to understand why Republicans are flipping their shit over reforming health care (and the inclusion of a Public Option), you need look no further than Social Security. They know damn well that once a proper Public Option is in place, they will never be able to get rid of it. This is a major overhaul of a severely broken aspect of how our entire country operates – an overhaul favored by 72% of the country. And a Public Option for health care is utterly toxic for the health insurance industry as it currently exists.

Its mere existence would force the current lineup of HMOs to have to end practices like mandatory denial rates (where medical directors are expected to be able to deny a certain percentage of all claims without even knowing what those claims will entail). They’ll be more reluctant to sift back through a person’s medical history looking for tiny excuses to drop their coverage as soon as they fall genuinely ill (even though they had no qualms about collecting premiums when the person was healthy). It just won’t be feasible to abuse their customers in pursuit of profit when any one of those customers will have an alternative that will never deny them coverage and will always charge an affordable rate.

But what scares them the most is the realization that, like Social Security, any sort of health care Public Option would become untouchable. No politician would be able to go after a program that popular because you can only buy a politician up to the point where the money matters. You couldn’t get a politician to campaign on a platform of cannibalism no matter how much money you handed to him because all of the advertising in the world won’t win him an election. Likewise, once public health care is available, the insurance industry understands that it’ll be here to stay. And that’s why they’re shooting their entire wad on killing it before it becomes law.

I mean, the alternative theory is that all of the various HMOs out there are spending millions on Senators, Congressmen and advertising because they’re really concerned about the average citizen. And if you believe that steaming load, I know for a fact that you’ve never been to the doctor for anything worse than a head cold. So brace yourself for the big push, maybe bigger than anything from the political right in terms of propaganda since the invasion of Iraq. They will fight against a Public Option to the bitter, bugger-all end because they know that once it’s here, it’s here to stay. They know that they’ve slowly created a monster of public mistrust and loathing over the past thirty-five years. And they’re scared.

They should be.

I shall caution you but once, gentle reader, before I dive into the thick of this murky dread. What follows is a mental miasma of self implosion and psychological contortions. It is what keeps terror up at night with the shakes. To progress further is to stare directly into the beating heart of madness. It is the Sanity Check that you cannot outroll. You have been warned, and I absolve myself of the damage you welcome by continuing.

So, Sarah Palin (that’s not the damage). I said before that she was done, over, finished as an almost-was. That she would fade back into the mists of relative obscurity only to be trotted out as a punchline or a tutorial on How Not To Do Things. However, I never said she’d go quietly.

But she is going. Resigning, in fact, from the Governorship of Alaska with a full year and a half left in her term. Turning the reigns of power over to, well, actually, I have no idea who becomes the Governor now, but since the state was functioning for several years with Sarah Palin as their chief executive and Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens as their senior statesman, I’d have to imagine that Alaska can’t possibly end up with worse leadership than a stick up her ass hillbilly and a ranting, raving old badger.

The big question is why, though. Why is she resigning as Governor barely more than halfway through her term? There are theories arcing across the Tubeosphere about it right now, ranging from an FBI investigation to a personal Marc Sanford style scandal. It’s easy content to take wild guesses about the motivations of a crazy person, especially if that crazy person happens to be famous. Her official reason is that she’s a lame duck Governor, and Alaska needs someone who can continue to lead. You know, speaking of crazy.

The problem is that her excuse is just noise. It’s nonsense. If a power saw tried to do an impression of television static, it would come out sounding like Sarah Palin giving a speech. I mean, she uses words, sure. But her words just don’t make any bloody sense. The Governorship of Alaska is a four year term. With a year and a half left on the clock, she’s already decided she’s a lame duck?  The mind reels at how brazenly full of shit she is. Am I to imagine, then, that if she were elected President (I know, I know, but humor the whack jobs for a minute), she’d only serve a six and a half year term? Wouldn’t want to lame duck it around the White House for eighteen months now would we?

Her other reason, you understand, is that she’s not a quitter. I actually like this line of thinking, because it helps to take the edge off of the lame duck excuse. I mean, that seems damn near logical next to the paralyzing thought that, in Sarah Palin’s mind, resigning her office for no reason is proof that she isn’t a quitter. I take a small amount of comfort in knowing that she neither understands nor believes the words coming out of her mouth. But still, like a small child starting a brush fire by playing with matches, the simple fact of her disingenuous nature does not at all detract from the fact that other human beings, many of them with at least some secondary education, are nodding their heads in approval of this bold and courageous move.

It was about eight months ago that I suggested Palin was the sort of self-aggrandizing con woman narcissist that would shit in her own hat and call it pumpkin pie if she thought someone would believe it. And if I didn’t say it then, really, I should have. When I suggested that she was proudly classless and grotesquely un-Presidential. When I proclaimed John McCain’s campaign officially over, wrung dry and left hollow by Sarah Palin’s alternating modes of political vampirism and pathetic attention whoring. I called her a stupid bitch and some people took offense. The woman just quit her job while telling people she isn’t a quitter. I’ll assume that there are apologies forthcoming.

The thing is, she’s sure she’s going to be the President one day. I can understand why – she’s likely surrounded entirely by suck ups and hangers on willing to fuel whatever aspirations and fantasies she conjures up in order to ride her name to success. And just the same way she made McCain’s already uphill battle into a soul crushing defeat, so will her thousand little vampires bring her down. The difference, really, is that McCain was smart enough to know better – but the old man let a little piece of ass he was never going to tap in the first place cloud his judgment. Sarah Palin? She believes her own shit doesn’t stink, and she judges other people based on whether or not they agree with her.

Though for a woman who won’t stop complaining about the media’s brutal and unjust treatment of her, she sure does seem eager to soak up as much media exposure as is humanly possible. For all of her pissing and moaning, she’d rush out in front of a speeding semi truck to get another interview with Charles Gibson or Katie Couric and she knows it. Because the one thing single most important thing that Sarah Palin can’t understand is that she isn’t already perfect.

You see, she didn’t embarrass herself taking questions about the Bush Doctrine or her weekly reading list or fungible energy sources or Vladamir Putin or whether abortion clinic bombers are terrorists or. . . well, you get the idea. She didn’t embarrass herself because of some shortcoming of her own. It was all those gotcha media journalist types. And now that she’s wise to their tricks, boy is she gonna show them a thing or two, you betcha.

It’s her defining characteristic, and it’s the thing that makes so many people so uneasy with her. Not coincidentally, it’s the thing that makes her so much like George Bush. Blame and fault are for other people, and if only we would judge her based on a theoretical set of circumstances that could have happened but didn’t, we’d see how great she is. She believes this down to her core, with every last fiber of her being. All of that humble, folksy charm bullshit is just that: bullshit.

So now Sarah believes that she’s too important to just be the measly Governor of Alaska. She’s a major player now, baby. She’s a superstar! And she has no intention of letting her fame and recognition dwindle up in those cold Alaskan peaks when she could be building up her Army of the Uninformed down in the lower 48s. You know, where all of those electoral votes come from. So Sarah Palin did what any homespun, real American would have done in her place. She quit her job and abdicated her responsibilities without any reason or warning whatsoever so she could come on down and strut her stuff. Maybe she’s forgotten how much bigger the pond is down here. I look forward to her re-re-education.

You know, when I said she’d be a relic by the next Presidential election, even I didn’t expect her to crash and burn in the first year. Even the right wing is turning on her, with a few notable exceptions like Bill Kristol. Bill thought her resignation was a brilliant move. Of course, he says the same thing about invading Iraq. And if if that kind of Cluster-Tasta-Fuckster-Phe is what passes in your mind for a job well done, then sure. Everything’s coming up roses for Sarah.

But back in the real world, Palin’s done. She’s too worn out to run for office, and she has neither the staying power nor the sufferability to transition into any sort of punditry / media celebrity. Crash and burn, sweetheart. Crash and fucking burn.