A Postscript:  Just as I was about to finish this rambling list of complaints and worries, I hear that an “anonymous white house official” (aka. Rahm Emanuel) is surprised, confused and irritated with progressive opposition to health care reform without a PUBLIC OPTION.  Anonymous goes on to say in the Washington Post on August 19: "I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," and "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform.”  Finally, Anonymous regards the whole opposition as “mystifying” and he admonishes, “We're forgetting why we are in this."  Keep taking Rahm’s advice President Obama things are working out so well.  Well, it would have if the progressives hadn’t thrown a wrench in the works.  Turns out all the health care confusion may have been a clever fabrication by Rahm and his henchmen so that the Obama Administration could play ball with the drug and health care insurers.  Greenwald (August 19) describes the plot succinctly:  “The Obama White House isn't sitting impotently by while Democratic Senators shove a bad bill down its throat.  This is the bill because this is the bill which Democratic leaders are happy to have.  It's the bill they believe in.  As important, by giving the insurance and pharmaceutical industries most everything they want, it ensures that the GOP doesn't become the repository for the largesse of those industries (and, conversely, that the Democratic Party retains that status).  This is how things always work.  The industry interests which own and control our government always get their way.  When is the last time they didn't?  The "public option" was something that was designed to excite and placate progressives (who gave up from the start on a single-payer approach) -- and the vast, vast majority of progressives (all but the most loyal Obama supporters) who are invested in this issue have been emphatic about how central a public option is to their support for health care reform.  But it seems clear that the White House and key Democrats were always planning on negotiating it away in exchange for industry support.  Isn't that how it always works in Washington?  No matter how many Democrats are elected, no matter which party controls the levers of government, the same set of narrow monied interests and right-wing values dictate outcomes, even if it means running roughshod over the interests of ordinary citizens (securing lower costs and expanding coverage) and/or what large majorities want.”  Seems like we have been punked.

I can only say this President Obama and Anonymous, you guys really don’t have to worry about getting your travesty of a health care reform bill passed.  All you have to do is get the progressives to try to block it legislatively.  When that happens the corporate council on health care will send down the edict to the Republicans to put the bill over the top.  Passing the industry health care bill is just too important to let languish around and take a chance that the Public Option might rear its ugly head again next year.  I know, your corporate overlords will be furious because the solution will be a little sloppy.  Republicans, or a large number of them, will actually have to vote for the bill and take partial ownership.  And the Obama Administration will have to team up with them, which they are only tacitly doing now.  And then, pilgrim, our eyes will open wide and we will see all of the culprits without their disguises, just like special sunglasses allowed John Nada to wake up and see through the cloaks of the alien invaders and realize that they had taken over the world in John Carpenter’s 1988 movie “They Live.” The plot goes like this, compliments of IMBd: “John Nada is a man without a job who walks around a big American city trying to find something to do. He finally finds a job as a worker and a place to spend the nights, but one day something terrible happens to him. John discovers a pair of sun-glasses through which he can see the true face of people. Many persons in this city are in fact aliens (from the Andromeda) and most of them are important members of our society. They keep humans in ignorance and they rule our world as they like. Nada must find the rest of the men that know what's happening (those who made the strange sun-glasses) and join them in the fight against the aliens.”  I found some of those sunglasses the other day and I am wearing them now, how about you, progressive nation?  It’s an ugly site, but we have to look.