Let's All Go Home and Let Joe Run the Country

At last: my very worst fears are about to become flesh:

The day before, Mr. Lieberman threatened on national television to join the Republicans in blocking the health care bill, President Obama’s chief domestic initiative. Within hours, he was in a meeting at the Capitol with top White House officials.

And on Monday night, Democratic senators emerged from a tense 90-minute closed-door session and suggested that they were on the verge of bowing to Mr. Lieberman’s main demands: that they scrap a plan to let people buy into Medicare beginning at age 55, and scotch even a fallback version of a new government-run health insurance plan, or public option.

Mr. Lieberman said he believed that the Medicare expansion was off the table, though he did not get any guarantee.

And of course, despite the wasted paragraphs spent fluffing Lieberman's ego, not one sentence was spent in this article on the fact that his wife is neck-deep in connections to the health insurance and Pharma industries. (Correction: The article did mention Lieberman kvetching that "...some people had begun attacking his wife, Hadassah, urging that she be fired from her job at a nonprofit organization that fights breast cancer, because she previously worked in public relations for two pharmaceutical companies." But that single sentence doesn't even begin to hint at the deep and decades-long tentacles Lieberman has within the various corporations for which she has worked and shilled.)

Where on earth is Obama in all this? What is wrong with our so-called leaders in the Senate, that they allow this hateful dwarf to lead them around by the nose in public like this? Doesn't anyone remember that we can have this watered-down compromise by reconciliation, and fuck the 60 votes?

And I'll bet that after he derails this "reform", he hangs on to his leadership position, too. I have an idea that will make him and his wife happy: let's just all line up every month and drop $600 into a bucket directly connected by pneumatic tube to the bank accounts of every insurance company and drug company in the country, and then go home and take care of our diseases with hot tea.