And I Feel Fine

I wanted to round up all the truly hyperbolic statements made over the last 24 hours about the Health Care Reform bill, and mock them.  But the more of them that I found the more I felt as though my soul--contingent upon my having one--were being winched out of my chest by some demon tractor with a confederate flag bumper sticker and a gun rack.  So I stopped.  The level of pure rhetoric in our politics today has reached World Federation of Wrestling levels.  You can't swing a stick through Washington without some congresscritter going on record about how the stick is likely to give us cancer or let the terrorists win.  It used to be hilarious--more and more it's just sad and nearly always infuriating.  John McCain says the Republicans are very butthurt and don't want to do their jobs anymore. Good.  He can stop coming to work then.  That's one less aged asshole we have to pay.  And can we take away his scary government provided health care while we're at it?  

   There's no "Whatever happened to the days of…?" here because frankly there aren't any "Good 'ol days!" I want to get back to.  I want to move forward.  I'd like to live in the future.  A future where a government uses the forces of capitalism as the engine for the ship of state, not the helmsman.  Where a problem gets addressed even when no one one likes the solution.  Where lying to the public and stoking irrational fear are the highest of political offenses.  That's the kind of future I'd like to live in and it's why I voted for Obama.  More than that, I made calls for Obama, sent e-mails, and even gave up a few beers each weekend to donate money to get him elected. Okay, that might be a lie.  There may not have been fewer beers in that equation.  But I didn't do all that because I agree with all of his policies.  I did that because the man isn't prone to crazy speech and rhetoric.  He doesn't tell me I have to be afraid of the rest of the world and the people in it.  He didn't say it would be easy, and he didn't promise me a rose garden.  If the future I want to live in is ever to be realized, it will be because our public servants and our politicians aspire to be more like Obama, and less like John McCain.  

And then there's this:  

It's the end of the world as we know it.