[Once again, this is a repost of a post I did for the old SmackChron blog in December 16th.]

Once again, I have to emerge from the basement after a brief absence to post something. Sorry about that, folks…a bit of poster’s block.

But, once again, I have to emerge to say the same four words that, unfortunately, have to be said about the entire health reform debacle now unfolding and unraveling:

I TOLD YOU SO.

I wish that I wasn’t so correct, but I’ve been saying all along that the Democrats (or, as I now refer to them, the Dimocrats) would snatch defeat from not only the jaws of victory, but the upper colon of victory by caving in to Big Business and Big Insura.

I called it correctly the minute that President Obama came out so strongly in support of Holy Joe Lieberman to keep his Democratic Caucus membership and his Homeland Committee chairmanship, even after he actively campaigned against Obama in favor of his Republican opponent (and nearly became the Republican VP nominee at John McCain’s behalf, only to be stymied by the Repub base in favor of Princess Sarah of Wassilla).

It only reenforced my prediction when Obama came out and made that deal with Billy Tauzin and the Big Pharma/Big Insura lobbyists to not require negotiation with pharmaceuticals at Medicare rates (or even Medicare + 5% rates), but rather reimburse rural doctors at “market costs”.

And, of course, every statement about how Obama would give “progressives” the option of the “public option” was followed by actions which directly underminded those statements and assured the ConservaDems in the Senate (Baucus, Bayh, Conrad, Landrieu, and Nelson, among others) to gut the PO that much more into a useless hollow shell.

And yet….even that wasn’t good enough for Holy Joe, who simply used the rope that was given him by Obama and Harry Reid to hang progressives over the cliff.

The expected and typical response of the A-list liberal blogosphere to the news that the “public option” was officially dead and the “Medicare buy-in” that would have served as the placebo to soothe their wounds won’t be offered either, was generally in the range from denial (“Write your congressman and MAKE them pass a REAL public option!!” screeched MoveOn.org) to anger at the ConservaDems and especially Lieberman for playing the Kingmaker (“Strip his ass of his committee chairmanships and boot him out of the Democratic Caucus!!!”).

But, perhaps all this was just smoke and mirrors to hide one haunting fact: this bill is EXACTLY what the Dems and Obama wanted in the first place.

And, that they were intent on first playing and then dumping the progressives all along with the “public option” myth.

I’ll just let Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com tell the sorry tale, since he does it better than I ever could:

Of all the posts I wrote this year, the one that produced the most vociferious email backlash — easily — was this one from August, which examined substantial evidence showing that, contrary to Obama’s occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it. From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House — hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama’s campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN). Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn’t pass it. The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party — rather than the GOP — will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage. Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this — the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional “centrists.” Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start — the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry. And kudos to Russ Feingold for saying so:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation. “This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” said Feingold. “I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect.”

Let’s repeat that: “This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place.” Indeed it does. There are rational, practical reasons why that might be so. If you’re interested in preserving and expanding political power, then, all other things being equal, it’s better to have the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry on your side than opposed to you. Or perhaps they calculated from the start that this was the best bill they could get. The wisdom of that rationale can be debated, but depicting Obama as the impotent progressive victim here of recalcitrant, corrupt centrists is really too much to bear.

Or, to put it another way: Democrats punk the Left….AGAIN. As they always have. As they always will.

Did you really think that an adminstration with attitudes like this would actually pass meaningful progressive reform??

“I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,” said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “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.” – quoted from a Washington Post 8/19/09 article, via Greenwald

Not just “the left”, mind you…but “the left of the left”…as if actually providing decent health care to everyone and removing the incentives for price gouging from private insurance was nothing less than a Communist/Socialist plot to undermine Americanism. And remember, this isn’t a Teabagger saying this, but a top Obama admin spokesperson (maybe even Rahm Emmanuel in abstensia).

And as for the silly notion that Lieberman will be punished for his treachery in opposing his own caucus on HCR: Oh, silly people, don’t you ever learn?? Punishment doesn’t apply to conservative/”centrist”/right-wing Democrats, they just do whatever the hell they want. If there is any retribution that will be wielded out in this debate, it will come from the White House….against the progressive Democrats who attempt to maintain what’s left of their shattered principles and oppose this mountain of crap disguised as Health Care Reform. That’s how it always is in the House of Representatives…the liberals get rolled, and then they get rolled again, and then they are threatened with loss of privileges and pork if they resist their geting rolled. Again, I quote Greenwald:

Indeed, we’ve seen before what the White House can do — and does do — when they actually care about pressuring members of Congress to support something they genuinely want passed. When FDL and other liberal blogs led an effort to defeat Obama’s war funding bill back in June, the White House became desperate for votes, and here is what they apparently did (though they deny it):

The White House is playing hardball with Democrats who intend to vote against the supplemental war spending bill, threatening freshmen who oppose it that they won’t get help with reelection and will be cut off from the White House, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) said Friday. “We’re not going to help you. You’ll never hear from us again,” Woolsey said the White House is telling freshmen.

That’s what the White House can do when they actually care about pressuring someone to vote the way they want. Why didn’t they do any of that to the “centrists” who were supposedly obstructing what they wanted on health care? Why didn’t they tell Blanche Lincoln — in a desperate fight for her political life — that she would “never hear from them again,” and would lose DNC and other Democratic institutional support, if she filibustered the public option? Why haven’t they threatened to remove Joe Lieberman’s cherished Homeland Security Chairmanship if he’s been sabotaging the President’s agenda? Why hasn’t the President been rhetorically pressuring Senators to support the public option and Medicare buy-in, or taking any of the other steps outlined here by Adam Green? There’s no guarantee that it would have worked — Obama is not omnipotent and he can’t always control Congressional outcomes — but the lack of any such efforts is extremely telling about what the White House really wanted here.

And also remember that Obama backed Blue Dog conservative Democrats over the more progressive Dems even when the progressive Dems were more popular (as in the case with congressional districts in Georgia and Louisiana).

So…the $64 question is now: What should we do now?? Should we accept whe inevitable giveaway bailout bill that will result as merely a tiny step forward in health care reform?? Or…should progs move to kill the whole process and start from scratch??

Before today, my opinion was unabashedly in the “Kill this Bill!!!!” group, with the caveat to start over next year with single payer and national health service as the foundation for a new effort. Having seen the handwriting on the wall and the total inability of the Dimocrats to even unite in shared fear over not passing health care, or to rush to pass whatever crap sandwich counts for “reform” however, my opinion has changed to the “Whatever” category.

More than likely, the Senate bill will become the main bill (especially if rumors are true that Obama will force the House to accept the Senate version with an up-or-down vote without any conference committee to intervene, and if the Senate buzzards are allowed to fly in and include ever worse amendments, such as a stricter anti-abortion requirement or a residency requirement for involvement in the “exchanges”, or more pork funding for “faith based initiatives’ or other forms of right-wing social engineering, designed to get the ConservaDems and “moderate” Reps like Snowe and Collins online). Then Obama will do as he did yesterday and officially endose the process, and then he and Rahm will lean heavily on the liberals to either shut the hell up and get in line behind “the best chance of passing meaningful health care reform” or oppose th entire bill on principle and risk getting the full wrath of the Village media for torpedoing HCR through their “left of the left” extremism and their “Cheetos and pajamas-wearing” blog overenthusiasm. The threat of the loss of money for reelection and pork projects should be enough to keep enough of them in line for this monstrosity to finally pass.

The Prez gets his Christmas Eve Rose Garden signing ceremony with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid on hand holding back crocodile tears of joy; Big Insura and Big Business get to chink their champagne glasses in dodging a political nuke and scoring a huge payday of coerced customers to fleece even more….and the Left and regular folks are once again left to sputter and ponder what the hell just happened.

And…everyone gets to prepare for an even bigger swindle and heist upcoming for 2011 or so….this time, of Social Security and Medicare on behalf of Big Business in the name of “deficit reduction”.

Change you can believe in…mighty grand, isn’t it??

And you wonder why I voted for Cynthia McKinney and the Greens in 2008??

And yeah, I shed a tear or two when Obama was announced the winner, because it’s still nice to have a person of color in charge, and because even a puppet would be better than having Dubya and the GOP for another term, heaven forbid having Quitter Spice and JohnnyMac anywhere near The Button. And HELL TO THE NO, I will never say that having Princess Sarah in the White House would be an improvement in any way. Problem is, though, that with the way that the Dims are tacking pretty far to the Right and pissing away their base, it might not even matter much anymore; the Teabaggers and Birthers may just win things by default.

All the more reason why an independent Left party and an autonomous Left of center popular movement is so sorely needed in this country right about now. The Dimocrats have basically shot their wads into the eyes of progressive Americans and shown themselves for the craven fools and liars they have always been. If there ever was an oppurtunity for a real hero to emerge to bust out of the Dimocrat ghetto and launch a true freedom movement, why not now…and why not you?? Hell, if the freakin’ New Orleans Saints have the opportunity to go unbeaten and win the Super Bowl, then anything can and will happen, right??

So…Who Dat say they gonna step up to the mic and lead the Next Left?? McKinney?? Kucinich?? Nader?? Conyers?? Sanders??.Anyone?? Who Dat???