George W. Obama
Sure, the sound of Republicans bitching and moaning is sweet, and their nutcase threats and insults, the bricks through the windows, and the silly lawsuits over Constitutional points settled long ago can only doom their efforts to create a little daylight be them and the raving Teabaggers. Delightful!
But the truth is, there is nothing in the new health care law to be celebrated. As has been pointed out, it is not too far from past Republican proposals, and it would have closer if Republican racism had not focused the party on defeating an Obama measure at any cost. In the end they did not break Obama, and they did not get their input considered in the outcome. But they still got a very Republican bill.
The health care law ensures profits for greed-based insurance corportations by ensuring the captive customers. This is not reform. This ensures that a real health care reform will not happen for generations, if ever. Mussolini had a word for government that allies itself with corporations instead of with the people.
This fairly completes Obama's transformation into Bush's third term. So far:
- Obama has not withdrawn the troops from Iraq.
- Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan.
- Obama has not closed Gitmo.
- Obama never sent Congress a single-payer health care plan, such as most industrial democracies have, and he bailed out of a 'public option' option early.
- Obama has attacked reproductive rights by signing an executive order against federal funding of abortions.
- The Obama administration has defended the homophobic DOMA from legal challenges.
- He's done nothing to institute regulation of the derivatives market, where the current economic catastrophe began. Wall Street firms who did more harm to America than a dozen 9-11 continue to pay executives obscene bonuses, often with money borrowed from the US Treasury. There is no jobs program in the Obama administration's recover plans — just shoveling more money into the same institutions that got us into this mess.
Obama is Bush's third term.
