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Monday, December 13, 2010

Amazing Indeed

Under the headline Amazing TPM's Josh Marshall writes:
A year ago, no one took seriously the idea that a federal health care mandate was unconstitutional. And the idea that buying health care coverage does not amount to "economic activity" seems preposterous on its face. But the decision that just came down from the federal judgment in Virginia -- that the federal health care mandate is unconstitutional -- is an example that decades of Republicans packing the federal judiciary with activist judges has finally paid off.

I must say that I find what Marshall writes amazing indeed. That is to say, my memory of a year ago had liberals outraged to the point of apoplexy that they would be mandated to buy crappy corporate insurance products without a public option or Medicare buy-in available to them.

Of course, liberal wonks defended the mandate as a necessary policy to make healthcare work, given that the single-payer or even any highly circumscribed public option they all actually infinitely preferred for good and obvious reasons was already off the table or swept off the table soon enough. But that is the farthest imaginable thing from the revisionism of his "nobody took seriously..."

And far from finding it wacky as Marshall seems to do that this mandate might be regarded as unconstitutional, indeed so much so that the only thing he can think to attribute such a decision to is "Republicans packing the federal judiciary with activist judges," my own memory is that the individual mandate was already a stupid right-wing "idea" (that is to say, as always, cynical deception and scheme), promoted as an alternative to the obviously sensible widely demonstrated as effective public insurance programs Democrats always actually favor, all as a way to keep the catastrophically failed for-profit insurance system we have in place despite its profound immorality and abject ineffectiveness.

Let me say that I have zero expectation that the public mandate -- so beloved by the scumbag moneybags of Big Insurance, after all -- is truly threatened by these court findings. I think there will be no problem at all finding ways to preserve it intact in the face of such challenges -- bipartisan agreements in which Republicans oil the skids to bazillionaire profits for their cronies all the while Democrats screw over their constituencies and take all the blame are sure to be the order of the day.

Like the Prescription Drug giveaway Republicans will get the poison pill twofer of catapulting vast sums to the already rich under cover of helping "ordinary Americans," while bankrupting the system to provide the pretext for oh-so-reluctantly gutting it, that is to say both bringing about feudalism while larding the would-be feudal lords with ever more wealth in anticipation of that feudalism.

This latest commentary by Marshall comes on the heels of a series of perplexing lampoons of free press hero Assange over at TPM, all of which combine to make me wonder if Marshall has been even more traumatized by the mid-term results than most good people or if, perhaps, he has been replaced by a pod-person.

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