Sickobama

The president measures his commitment to CHANGE.

American liberals are so easily yanked. It really doesn't take much. And in Obama's hands, their acquiescence is reliably assured, regardless of any "doubts" or "concerns" they might express. A brief tour of the libosphere bears this out, from Huffington Post to Daily Kos to The Nation and all points in between. All President Verbiage needs to do is pour out the purty words, and libs fall to their knees, lapping it up.

Health care "reform" is of course a sick joke. The corporate stranglehold on medical care and pharmaceuticals is so tight, so vast, so unrelenting, that it would require an executive coup of sorts to loosen it, much less break it. Obama has no intention of doing anything of this kind. Status quo you can believe in.

Driving around last night, listening to Fox Radio, I heard a sound bite "warning" from King Kos himself, Markos Moulitsas, who promised some kind of action should Obama fail to deliver on health care. Kos didn't say exactly what he and his minions would do should their Father Leader further let them down, and there's a good reason for that -- they got nothing. No leverage, no power, no sway. Nada. Bloated rhetoric and empty threats. That's it. Come 2012, they'll march dutifully back into the booth and vote Obama/Biden, insisting that you follow suit or risk fascism.

Meantime, the right wing continues to flip out, throwing around their bizarre concepts about socialism and mind control. This is good news for liberals, as they can use this lunacy to enhance and justify their obedience to the corporate Dems. It also gives liberals a platform to defend the imperial state, as many did after Rep. Joe Wilson heckled Obama during his speech. Why, the nerve of Wilson! Has he no respect for the President of The Most Awesome States Ever Assembled Ever?

Wilson may be nuts, but at least he has balls. How many Dems dared to disrupt Bush when he spewed out the lies? I can't think of one -- certainly not our current Vice President and Secretary of State, both of whom applauded and supported Bush's call for mass murder. Again, liberals have no problem with the US imperial structure. They simply want one of their "own" to manage it.

READ: Commentary from last night's live blog response to Obama's speech from my friends at the Institute for Public Accuracy. As pal Doug Henwood put it:

"A friend pointed out to me earlier today that the market capitalization—the value of all the outstanding stock—of the publicly traded health insurers is about $150 billion. Add a little premium to sweeten the pot and you could nationalize the lot of them for about $200 billion. The total administrative costs of the U.S. healthcare system, which are greatly inflated by all the paperwork and second-guessing of docs’ decisions generated by the insurance industry, are about $400 billion a year. Those administrative costs are about three times what a Canadian-style single payer system would cost. So that means we’d save about $250 billion a year by eliminating the waste caused by our private insurance system.

"In other words, the nationalization could pay for itself in well under a year.

"Will Obama propose anything like that? Of course not. Instead, he’s going to propose that Americans be required to buy insurance, probably with some government subsidies. So instead of euthanizing the private insurance industry, Obama & the Dems are going to provide them with tens of millions of new customers—compelled to buy their product by law, and with some degree of public subsidy. That’s lunacy."