It's over, now we can go back to not having health care

Well the seven hour bipartisan health care summit is over. What did it accomplish? Well, it did make millions of Americans say to themselves "Isn't there a bronze medal women's hockey game that I could be watching instead of this?" Yes, America, yes there was. Finland 3 Sweden 2.

But other than that, nothing happened. It was essentially seven hours of people demanding the right to give a prepared speech. Those speeches had two themes. The Republican's speeches usually include an egregious lie about health care, a "sky is falling" cry that Democrats must not subject the country to the tyranny of majority rule in the Senate, and a paean to start over. The Democrat's speeches usually involved some veiled shot at GOP obstructionism, some forced praise of this bill as a shining blinding light of goodness, and the promise that if Republicans fucked with them 30 or 40 more times, that they'd totally go and pass this bill by themselves.

Almost every one of our elected betters also regaled the country with some horror story of the grievous personal injury or illness of Mr. or Mrs. Regular American with he point being that we should either do something to help them or in the GOP's case, theoretically do something, but not what Democrats propose. All in all it was a massive waste of time and a test of this county's ability to withstand nonstop political bullshit.

But at the end of all this nonsense the Democrats had one abiding message: they're totally finally going to do something, probably.

President Obama challenged Republicans to do some "soul searching" on whether they will support the Democratic health care plan, using the final moments of his health care summit to ask them to put up or shut up. If they don't want to cooperate, the two parties can battle it out at the polls this November, the president said.

Obama's statement and Democratic reactions after the summit were the clearest signal yet that the majority party is charging ahead and abandoning attempts at bipartisanship.
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"We are going to move forward, the ball is in everybody's court," Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters after the summit.
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"Time is of the essence ... it's time we did something and we're going to do it," Reid said.

Really? You don't want to give the Republicans a thousandth chance to come on board in the name of bipartisanship? You're finally convinced that you'll have to do this alone? You're going to considering doing the minor clean-up work it would take to finalize the massive bills you already passed? It's about fucking time.