I have many times in the last year and a half written or tweeted about healthcare reform, an issue I am very close to for many personal reasons that have nothing to do with this article. I have harangued critics who want no real change to the healthcare landscape at all, for being badly-misinformed puppets of monied special interests and the puppets they employ in our government. Today, with the apparent impending passage of a weak sauce insurance industry handjob of a healthcare bill in the Senate, a bill so watered down as to be almost completely useless, I want to take this momentous occasion  in history to thank every one of you ignorant cocksuckers out there that made this limp-wristed pile of monkey shit inevitable. To those of you who have continually criticized any sort of public option or single-payer healthcare, especially those who complained about it for no other reason than it was "socialism," I want to give an extra special thanks in the form of this statement.

Fuck you, you got yours.

This thank-you statement is, of course, what we as a nation should now adopt as our national motto, the creed, the very philosophical foundation on which we will build the future we deserve. Why? Nothing says ignorant bag of self-destructive cockgobblers like the attitudes we have taken towards providing basic goddamn healthcare to anyone without the means to pay than "Fuck you, I got mine." So for each individual in the following groups, I want to offer this saying.

Fuck you, you got yours.

To all you motherfuckers on Medicare who screamed at town hall meetings that Obama was a fascist who wanted "death panels" and that a public option was socialist, fuck you, you got yours. Your continued health, your very fucking life is entirely dependent on a "socialized" system that every working American pays into their entire working lives, and by all accounts works with more cost efficiency than private insurance, including the Medicare plans administered by private companies. And how do they do that? By negotiating lower rates with doctors, which according to most of the free market cocksuckers out there, is an abject sin.

To all those veterans who have given their lives and limbs to our country but complain that we might give public, socialized medicine to people regardless of their ability to pay, fuck you, you got yours. Before President Bush and the Neocon Parade drove our military straight into the ground with a useless fucking war in Iraq and overloaded it, the VA medical system was as efficient and well-run as Medicare. It was also completely funded by taxes that we all pay. It's not even a remotely equitable trade - you give up your lives for our freedoms and we give you healthcare. It's the least we can do. But don't complain when we want similar care paid for with our taxes.

For all of you with employer-provided healthcare, fuck you, you got yours. Yes, you most certainly do pay your premiums - but your employer pays more. Not only that, but both you and your employer's purchase of that insurance is subsidized by the government, which means its partly paid for by our taxes. These subsidies are in the form of the tax breaks for premiums (since they are taken out pre-tax) on individuals, but also tax breaks on employers. Incidentally, I am in this group myself - my employer pays most of my individual premium, and we both get tax breaks for it. The fuck me will come when I have to use this insurance and it's fairly large deductible and varied procedure schedule - something that will hit me directly in the pocket book at times when I can't work. I actually have to pay another premium for supplemental insurance to help cover those costs when I do get sick. As good as my subsidized plan is, I still could face serious financial ruin if I get deathly ill. And I can't afford the high premium to cover my self-employed wife with that, so fuck me twice.

To every motherfucking one of the Senators and Representatives currently bitching, moaning and complaining that ANYTHING that restricts the health insurance industry in the slightest is potentially passing through Congress, a huge fuck you, you got yours. You currently suckle at the best government healthcare teat imaginable, paying fuckall for a Cadillac insurance plan funded by the taxpayers, complete with your own fucking at call doctors and nurses in the same goddamn building. They don't even charge a co-pay. Their fuck you also covers anyone working in a government job using government health insurance who doesn't want to extend that coverage to the rest of us.

In short, YOU ALL GOT YOURS, and fuck the rest of us. Thank you very much for torpedoing any sort of real healthcare reform in favor of vague, idiotic worries about a political system you don't even understand, a knee-jerk buzzword taught you by vapid cuntwhistle pundits like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, used repeatedly to bludgeon the fear of anything that might hurt their master's bottom lines into you. These bastards don't even deserve the courtesy of a fuck you. They got theirs years ago have are merely fattening their larders on your sheep-like stupidity.

And finally, I'd like to direct a special fuck you, you got yours to Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, both of whom did everything in their power to ensure that real healthcare reform never made it into the bill being considered now. Lieberman appears to have done so simply to be pissy, while Nelson whored his vote for full Medicaid funding for his state and no one else. Congratulations, citizens of Nebraska, you are now the welfare state. Fuck you, you got yours.

I only hope when the clusterfuck that this bill creates comes crashing down around all our ears in five to ten years, all you bastards will be without the socialized care you currently enjoy. Maybe then you'll start to realize that every other fucking country in the world does healthcare for everyone in their country better and cheaper than we do with that evil socialism you ignorantly harp on about. Until then, wake up every morning and say the new national motto.

Fuck you, I got mine.

Labels: Corporate Corruption, Government Corruption, Government Idiots, Health Care, Things I'd Like to Fire Into the Sun

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I've never been a fan of Hillary Clinton's, despite the respect I have for the presidency of her husband. She is a thoroughly unlikeable woman, whose good ideas are balanced by an equal weight of bad ideas. Since her carpetbagging move from Arkansas to New York in order to run for a Senate seat, I have felt the same unfortunate vibe from her that I do from her husband, i.e. that both are rabid politicians, who will say or do anything to get elected. While Bill Clinton's geniality and ability to properly fake human sympathy make him likeable, Hillary Clinton's entire personality is not only acerbic, but rings of a striking phoniness down at the gut level. Even so, were she to win the Democratic nomination, I would vote for her over John McCain, if only because McCain's chorus of "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" and his flip-flopping on the propriety of torture have convinced me he is as much of a rabid politician as any other. But some of Sen. Clinton's comments in today's Chicago Tribune story make me want to fire her into the sun.

According to the article:

Speaking at George Washington University, Clinton chided Obama for what she said was a lack of experience that could rival a Bush administration that had a strategy based on "false choices and then is indifferent about the consequences -- force versus diplomacy, unilateralism versus multilateralism, hard power versus soft."

"We've seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security," she said. "We can't let that happen again."

Clinton cited her experience in the White House with her husband during times of crises as well as her service as a two-term New York senator on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but being the wife of the President is not an elected position. It is not typically a position that comes with any civil authority whatsoever other than perhaps the running of the household at the White House. Any authority or power of the position is at most granted out of deference to the wife of the President.

So how fucking arrogant do you have to be to claim eight years as first wife as any kind of governing or foreign policy experience? Whispered pillow talk does not make for foreign policy experience. Listening to your husband vent about the Republican noise machine does not make for crisis management. And while Mrs. Clinton was certainly the target of many personal and nasty attacks during her time as First Lady, that no more prepares her for service as Commander in Chief than running the drive-thru at a fucking McDonalds.

As for your time on the Senate Armed Services Committee, let's see where that time got this nation. Oh right, it got you to vote to give this cluster fuck of a President authorization to use force in Iraq. Five years later, this country is still paying for that mistake in blood and treasure. If that is the kind of whip smart decision-making your experience will give us, then I will kindly tell that experience to fuck right off. If you'd like to run on your record of experience, your record tells me you are an easily-led tool who has enabled our President to skullfuck this country into the ground. Do you really want to run on your experience?

Senator Obama may be young and fresh-faced. He may not have been the snuggle bunny of a sitting, popular President. That doesn't mean he can't approach foreign policy as well if not better than you or any of the other clowns who've had a hand in our foreign policy for over a decade. And unlike you, Sen. Clinton, Sen. Obama did not vote to invade Iraq, which tells me he has more foreign policy foresight than you showed.

First Lady is not a position of authority, and it is not the kind of experience you can put on a resume. Please shut up about your time as Wife-in-Chief or get the fuck on the Sol Rocket Express.

Labels: Bush Administration, Government Corruption, Hillary Clinton, Politics, Presidential Campaign 2008, Things I'd Like to Fire Into the Sun

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Political campaigns bring out my stabby side. From the carefully constructed, focus-grouped to death, faux personality masks worn by all the candidates the closer to victory they come, or the sheer deluge of lies spewed forth by proxy from the Mr. Ed-like mouths of mouthpiece candidates, election season is a time that breeds pure, violent cynicism so concentrated, it could be cooked on a spoon and shot into the veins of junkies everywhere. Such distilled essence of jaded hatred would induce murderous rages in everyone exposed to the narcotic byproduct of our nation's grand democracy illusion. With that in mind, I find myself wanting to place a number of people into a giant pit, filling the pit with cement and then firing the said missile of maladjusted, loosely-defined humanity into the heart of the sun. The people deserving of my ire this day are the various campaign strategists on all sides of the American political spectrum.

The most famous of these type of wonktastic twats in recent memory is Karl Rove, everyone's favorite Turd Blossom. While Rove's evil heart has been well-revealed to those with enough independent thought left to pierce the narrative of bullshit spun about himself and his candidates, he is only the most visible symptom of the great cancer eating the heart of American democracy. Every campaign has a Karl Rove, a shitheel of varying degrees of evil and disingenuousness, someone to take all the polls and opinions and craft them into a message that fools the target demographic into believing his or her candidate. This person is a master of PR, the abbreviated avatar of public relations, the masterful liar wrapping layers of bullshit around a kernel of truth. And while most PR people are empty, soulless shells of humanity with less respect for their fellow man's intelligence than for a dung beetle's skill with the cello, campaign strategists are the lowest form of a very low rung of the demon army. They are lies made flesh.

Over the last few weeks, the media has done one bang-up job of crafting a specific narrative about the Democratic primary race. Instead of a three or two person race between Clinton, Obama and Edwards, the media has now presumptively anointed Hillary Clinton the "frontrunner," delegating every other candidate to a hind-teat-sucking also-ran. Much as Howard Dean was trumpeted as the saviour of the party in 2004 before getting dickstomped by the moribund Kerry when America was given the choice, Hillary Clinton has been practically handed the nomination, at least by the mainstream media with a vested interest in seeing the status quo of American politics continue. As a result, the campaign strategists of most of the other Democratic candidates have shifted focus.

Rather than talk about their own campaign's positives, now all Obama and Edwards want to talk about is how they are different or better than Hillary. The last Democratic debate was an almost overwhelming pile-on by both Tim Russert and the other candidates, all trying to one-up the other's Hillary-bashing cred. Obama's visit to the Saturday Night Live set treated us to a skit where Obama made fun of Hillary, if not in a nasty way, in a certainly unseemly manner. Yes, hunting season has begun, and everyone's trying to kill the golden goose.

I'm not naive enough to believe that attack ads and negative campaigns don't work. All evidence is that they do work and work well. But in a political climate where the stakes are so goddamn high, the one thing the Democratic Party and its candidates need to do is focus on why their party would be better for America than anything the Republican party has to offer, not just in its current form but in its future candidates. No matter what Hillary's flaws are, and trust me, they are legion, she's still a better candidate than anything on the GOP ticket. Sniping at the media's frontrunner just makes the whole process seem as seedy as the red light district in Amsterdam. The campaign strategists for all the Democratic candidates, and the Republicans as well, should be dropped into a pit, sealed in with concrete and shot into the heart of the sun, never to trouble us again. Only the white-hot nuclear fusion of the lifegiver can possibly eradicate the darkness these wastrels drag around them like the shrouds of death.

But the true problem with these people isn't even their own shameless evil. No, they only highlight the problem with privately-financed elections. The campaign money the media makes during election season is as much a poison to the system of democracy as the fundraising necessity is for a candidate's impartiality. If we are eventually to achieve some form of egalitarian democratic system, we need public election finance, with money distributed evenly to each candidate and airtime donated to the political process.

We'll have the rocket capable of firing campaign strategists into the heart of the sun before we'd ever see that system in place. Still, one can dream.

Labels: Elections, Government Corruption, Humor, Presidential Campaign 2008, Television, Things I'd Like to Fire Into the Sun

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