Are You Listening, Mr. President?

This was the response Arlen Specter got when he used the word "fast" in relation to the health care bill.



The fact that there is mass outrage over the impending socialized medicine bill, coupled with the President's ever plummeting poll numbers, leads me to one conclusion:

President Obama knows that Americans by and large reject his socialist agenda the more they learn about it. As a good ideologue, he is trying to rush his ideology through and get it enacted into law before he is voted out of office. It appears that the President's favorite word--"change"--is actually more important to him than getting re-elected. I'm serious. If he were more interested in a second term, if the polls really were a concern to him, he would have quietly let the bill derail by now. Instead aide-de-camp Rahm Emanuel has been moving heaven and earth to at least get this bill out of committee in the House, and he has succeeded.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps August, with it's drum beat of ever-dipping polls and oft repeated scenes of outrage in town hall meetings, will take its toll and persuade the President that this issue is a loser. But I doubt it.

There's actually a third possibility I haven't considered, and it is probably the most likely: Barack Obama is so blinded by his own arrogance that he's determined to just give us what's good for us, whether we like it or not, and defeat in 2012 is simply in his mind an impossibility. For in order for him to be defeated, he would have to will it so.

And arrogant he is. Note the response to how poorly Obamacare has been received: There's greater need to "get out there and explain" the plan to the American people because they obviously "don't understand" what's in there. Well, a little hard to have a total grasp on a bill that hasn't even been written in it's final form. However, we get the basics, Mr. President. We get that it will cost, per the CBO's latest and no doubt deliberately underestimated budget, a bare minimum of $1 Trillion over the next decade (for a more realistic number, tripling the figure would probably get closer). We get that private insurance is to be phased out. We get that business owners, looking to recoup the "surtax" sodomizing that will be levied against the "rich," and already struggling to maintain their work force in a crap economy, will start dumping their employees into Obamacare by the bushelfull. We get that private insurers, faced with the loss of a huge percentage of their client base and unable to compete with the sweetheart deals that the government will negotiate for itself with healthcare providers, will steadily go out of business. We get that the medical profession will be dumbed down, because the best and the brightest aren't going to go into a profession that will make them little more than postal workers with stethoscopes. We get that care will be rationed, and that deadbeat relatives of contributors to political campaigns will soon be on the other end of our phones, explaining to us why our "cost-ineffective" procedures are being denied.

We get it. Obama knows we get it all too well. And so the need for speed. The need to rush it through now, before we can stop it.