Thursday, October 15, 2009

Labyrinth

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to
care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix
actual crises. What our government is good at is something else
entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the
actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious
legislative maneuvers.

It's a situation that one would have thought would be sobering
enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they
did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and
laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a
tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if
that's what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main
players — from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog
turncoat Max Baucus — found some unforeseeable,
unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up
We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the
moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad