Now that we see that health care reform was all a game, and that the fix was in all along, I recall the days when many of us argued over whether spending energy pushing for prosecution of Bush crimes was a waste of time. Instead, let's work for something real and tangible, like HCR. My own friends said grow up, what was done was done, and to focus on the fight ahead. We had a president and two strong majorities.
Now that we have been betrayed, the public option is dead, and HCR looks like Christmas for insurance companies, perhaps it is the enforcement of present laws, rather than making new ones which should occupy our attention again. Perhaps our tolerance of warrantless spying, Iraq war lies, and political persecutions like the one against Gov. Don Siegelman by Karl Rove, is what brought us to this ugly pass in the first place. Both parties, without even bothering to disguise it, clearly do not give the least little damn about what we think. They will do what is good for their corporate contributors, smile, and spin it like it is a great victory for us. Please, if you're going to screw men, screw me. But don't pee down my back then try to tell me that it's raining out.
The 11th Circuit upheld Siegelman's conviction this year, so that really threw me off. That, and Obama's refusal to pardon or push for commutation, made me wonder. After I had made up my mind the Governor was innocent and I had fought for him, did he do something wrong after all?
If he did not, then Karl Rove got away with it and the Democratic party showed it will not raise a finger to take care of its own in a blatant frame-up. If he did, then a lot of people who rose to his defense got took. I hate living with that kind of ambiguity, so I went to good old wiki to learn more. It was still clear as mud until I got to the part where a key witness against Rove had her house burned down, and her car run off the road.
"In June 2007, a Republican lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson of Rainsville, Alabama, signed a sworn statement that, five years earlier, she had heard that Karl Rove was preparing to neutralize Siegelman politically with an investigation headed by the U.S. Department of Justice...Simpson's house burned down soon after she began whistleblowing, and Simpson's car was driven off the road by a private investigator and wrecked. As a result of the timing of these incidents, Simpson said, "Anytime you speak truth to power, there are great risks. I've been attacked," explaining she felt a "moral obligation" to speak up."
What's that? On top of Mike McConnell's small plane crash, the star witness against Rove in the Ohio 2004 election-stealing lawsuit, which at the time would be roundly shouted down at this site with "conspiracy theory!" and "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," you're telling me this and Karl Rove is out working the Neo-Con rubber chicken circuit a free man? That told me all I needed to know about the Siegelman case. I'm sorry Don, that I ever doubted you. How bribery gets to be the story rather than potential arson and even murder is beyond me.
We'll, health care reform or no, the congresscritters are still collecting a couple hundred grand of your money each year and should have to do something for it. We sat through the roller coaster ride of thinking that our participation would get us something, if we followed the exhortations of the silver-tongued gentlemen and their assistants to call, call, call. Knowing all along it meant nothing and the fix was in.
There's a smell coming from the empty bedroom. It's the Bush closet, getting smellier every day. Something tells me that it's all related, the phony health care play and the overt law-breaking, and looking the other way. It's called a sense of entitlement to egregious behavior. If we're not going to get the new roof-deck of HCR, may as well roll up our sleeves and get to that dirty job we've been dreading, do some clean-up. Funny thing is, now, I'm just in the mood.