Summitry

The all important health reform summit is ongoing RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE. This is the meeting to end all meetings, the meeting to solve all health care problems, and what America hopes will be a somewhat interesting diversion until Olympic coverage starts up again for the day.

I am actually making a large assumption that this health care summit is actually going to get out of preliminary opening speeches. After all, I have no idea if the White House was able to obey all the GOP's demands for this summit. You know, all important stuff like the use of a podium, table shape, seating and camera arrangements, and namecard design. Sure sure, we all want to come together to find a plan to fix this giant health care mess, but I'll be damned if anyone from the Republican Party is going to do it at a round table! So if the GOP is happy with the seating arrangements and Obama agrees to their other all-important demands, like the wearing of green socks and a non-threatening cornflower blue tie, blue binders to hold talking points, Harry Reid has to alternately lift his right and left feet with every word he says, and Jay Rockefeller has to be escorted to and from the proceedings in a wheelbarrow pushed by Dick Durbin, then we can finally get down to the business of fixing health care. Until the lunch break. By God the Democrats better hope they don't fuck up the lunch order or the GOP will walk away just like that.

Over the course of the six hour summit.... six hours? What the fuck? This seems less a serious effort to reform our health system than and attempt to test America's endurance for cheap political theatre. Man John Boehner is really going to have to come up with a whole hell of a lot of ways to say "While we agree with the need to reform the system, we disagree with everyone of your proposals and commit to supporting none of them", while Obama is really going to have to rephrase the sentence "Wonderful proposal you have there... was it written completely by a insurance executive? I'll have my people look over it and pretend we didn't reject it over the past few years we were working on this because that idea didn't help anyone, cut costs, or improve our health system." Ought to be an entertaining six hours.

So what is the point of this whole summit? Who knows. Republicans have already committed to opposing everything Democrats want, so I'm not sure a six hour talk is going to make them start understanding logic or caring about the health problems of people in this country. Plus, they already made the demand that unless Democrats scrap the entire plan and start over, they won't be helping in the slightest. Democrats will in no way listen to Republican ideas to scale back the entire focus of the bill and ignore things like full coverage, rate jacks, and pre-existing conditions.

So instead we'll get six hours of our elected betters coming up with circular ways of saying "Fuck you" and "No, fuck you." Which is entertaining, I guess. But that pretty much describes the entire pathetic state of our government: they can only come together to give money away to large corporations or engage in large scale theatrical bullshit that will have no effect on policy or legislation. And we wonder why our country is in dire straights. Ah well, hopefully someone says something embarrassing, passes out, or cold cocks Eric Cantor. At least then this diversion will have been useful.