Let Them Eat Teabags

There’s nothing quite as sad as the spectacle of people wearing teabags on their hats while demanding that their health and the health of their children and neighbors be sacrificed to the gods of insurance industry hellfire.

Tonight, President Barack Obama will speak to the nation, going over their teabagged heads to try and reach the last remnants of a sane America. Meanwhile, Gov. Rick Perry continues to steep his own teabag in the cracked cups of the witless. Try and make us healthier, Perry threatens, and Texas will secede from the Union. We are a self-reliant people, by God, so the Texas Republic’s new President Perry will propose, at market prices, pliers for the poor with toothaches and handsaws for diabetics with foot ulcers.

What Perry leaves out, among other things, is this: responsibility. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to one another. Law, order and the fragile social fabric depend upon responsibility. In recent years Republicans have tried to make selfishness a synonym for responsibility. It’s not.

Yes, Obama faces a tough challenge. The hypocritical, the hateful and the hazy-brained were outraged at his speech yesterday to the nation’s schoolchildren, in which he urged kids to work hard and stay in school. Somehow, they forget themselves. In Midland, for instance, those worried today about presidential indoctrination suspended classes and bussed students to at least three George W. Bush-related events. And where was Bush on September 11, 2001? In a school of course, reading to the kids. Arlington school administrators banned President Obama, but they’ll bus hundred of students to see Bush next week.

Why, a person might jump to the conclusion that the skin color of the president has something to do with this sudden fear of the office of President of the United States. The angry parents are, of course, showing real disrespect for the office. These same angry parents smashed and burned Dixie Chick CDs because the singers criticized Bush. And, if the multiple levels of hypocrisy aren’t clear enough, it should be noted that these situational ethicists are the ones who argue for moral absolutes.

Crazy as this is, heretofore unimagined heights of ignorance are reached by a people demanding they be kept sick. They argue, loudly, for premature death at the hands of insurance profiteers who deny coverage and benefits to millions of us, including those of us who pay their exorbitant salaries with our premiums.

The health care issue is not as complicated as the insurance industry wants us to believe. Reform advocates simply want us to be able to buy into Medicare – or something like it – early. This will make us healthier, more productive, and less contagious. With swine flu on the rise, this last thing is not inconsequential. When teabags give way to surgical masks at townhall meetings, maybe the point will sink in.

No one will be forced to abandon their private insurance plans. Power is returned to patients and doctors. Government does not dictate care. Everyone wins. And, we are able to say proudly that in America, we care about one another.

But Perry needs a platform, and the insurance industry that owns him wants to keep its power over our lives and our health. They concoct a grassdupes movement. It’s not very big, really, but it seems to fill the screens of the idiot-making, truth-defying TV news shows. The only things worse than a dupe are the dupes duped by virtual dupes.

So, we’ll watch tonight and see if Obama can clear the air a bit. Here are some things to keep in mind.

The insurance industry was never going to be mollified and was never going to compromise on health care reform. Neither were the elected officials they’ve bribed. Obama needs to remember the fable of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion asks the frog for a ride across the river. The scorpion promises he won’t sting the frog. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog. Asked why, he answers, “I’m a scorpion. That’s my nature.”

Whatever Obama says won’t matter to Rick Perry, big insurance and or its grassdupes. Obama could put a family physician in every pot at no cost to taxpayers and the idiots will still reach up under their teabags, pull their hair and rend their garments. Obama should shave them himself and throw down the gauntlet for real reform.

Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton all tried to reform an American health care system held captive by the unscrupulous, even murderous, barons of big insurance. Texans might remember it was Johnson, one of our own, who made the most progress. He passed Medicare and Medicaid.

And, here’s a bet. Post-speech punditry will focus upon political gamesmanship and partisan maneuvering. Little will be said about your health, your children’s health or the health of your neighbors. Nothing will be said by the analysts about the moral imperative to care for one another, an omission that reveals the pundits’ own moral inadequacies. And, despite the fact that no American politician has been beaten because of a vote for Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, the pundits will go on and on about the political risks of health care reform. Since the insurance companies will need the politicians more after reform is passed than they do now — Medicare has been very good for the lobbyists, too –  we will be left to wonder what the hell risks they are talking about.