There’s a breed of Democratic politician that wants nothing more than to fuck you over in the spirit of compromise with Republicans, whose party has rarely been so benighted or politically irrelevant – so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats, the bane of progressives, moderates who want to end wars or not go bankrupt from medical expenses, and anyone who doesn’t think it’s a noble aim to split the difference every time, especially when the difference is vast due to the perniciousness of the other side’s ideas.
A fight over the future of America’s health care system is fomenting. It isn’t going to be an easy battle for president Obama or his staunchest allies in Congress, because medical insurance companies have been enabled to run a highly effective racket wherein they squeeze every dollar from working Americans they can, and as soon as someone gets sick enough to really need the insurance, the companies look for loopholes that would allow them to renege on their promises. Blue Dogs understand the complexities of the situation, and they sympathize. With the insurance companies.
Though many of them signed a pledge that they supported a public option in health care reform, Blue Dogs recently made an about-face that was in no way influenced by lobbyists in a field their party hopes to fundamentally alter. They just, you know, had a change of heart, and now they think the public option should be off the table unless insurance companies, really, truly mess up somewhere down the line, at which point it would finally be triggered. This is the “Third Way” approach to health care, that way leading off a cliff into the gorge of an unchanged status quo.
Personally, I support the “Fourth Way,” which tells the Third Way to sod off, puts leashes on the Blue Dogs, and takes them on a nice, long walk to a quiet spot in the middle of the woods. Once there, they’ll be tied to trees and told they’ll get neither dog chow nor water until they quit their infernal yapping. Some may say that treating dim-witted animals this way is abuse, and were it any other breed, I’d be inclined to agree; in this case, however, I say it’s Pavlovian conditioning with the good of the neighborhood in mind.
