Castor Oil

Look, I didn't even want Obamacare in the first place. Ever since the Clinton healthcare overhaul blew up in everyone's and Monica Lewinsky's face, I've been fundamentally twitchy about anything to do with health insurance reform. I turned 18 in 1992, exactly the same year that MTV said I had to vote for Bill Clinton because George H.W. Bush was going to outlaw boners and weed or something. I admit I'm a little fuzzy on the details. I just remember Kurt Loder being very serious about it and back then, you did what the scary TV zombie head said.

The things that happen to you in your formative years tend to gain an outsize sense of either romantic grandeur or paralyzing, perilous doom. I voted for Bill Clinton so I could keep my boners and your weed.* But instead of the promised paradise Kennedy-esque optimism, a post-Cold War era of unmatched peace and an extra recess after lunch, we got a complicated mess of a failed healthcare reform followed very closely by Speaker of the House Newt Fucking Gingrich.

So that political conflagration was burned completely into my nascent political psyche, rendering me unable to consider the idea of sweeping health care legislation without watering eyes, flop sweat, the shivers and maybe just a little bit of an erection. I don't know what the last part means either except for maybe that Freud wasn't wrong about quite everything.

I was horrified by the Obama attempts to... do whatever he did with the Obamacare stuff. Pretty much everything I know about it comes from the HR department at work and they usually remember to put a colored sticky arrow thingy next to the part on the forms I have to sign stuff, so maybe some of the finesse points are lost on me. But all the things that seemed really traumatic in the process of getting the system sparked into Rube Goldberg-ian life have been rendered almost adorably quaint by the new apocalyptic storm of shit that inevitably follows. The initial passage fight, followed by the Supreme Court challenge, the government shutdown... each one loomed up to cast its predecessor in shadow. And now it's the fact that nobody can seem to get healthcare from it and the president had to come out today and give it the ole Reagany "mistakes were made" treatment and promising to, as I understand it, shove whole parts of the implementation down the road.

All of this hits a lot too close to my political-childhood trauma. The worst part is that, say, unlike a child of divorce, I can't manipulate one or both sides into taking me to Sea World when I should be doing my homework or buying me a car to prove to me which of them really loves me more. Instead all I'm getting is either a cancelled insurance policy or a significant increase in rate in exchange for the same or worse coverage? Worst mommy-state ever.

After the hard-fought wins to beat back every challenge to Obamacare thus far, it's maddening to see the support even around the Democratic political core get all ghosty and indistinct. Sometimes I think the only reliable political ally Barack Obama has left is Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto. He's doing everything his chubby, crack-stained hands can manage to draw attention to himself and away from the current debacle. It's working to a degree, but after today's speech by the president, it's clear that it's not enough. This has me worried. An elected mayor in an Alpha World City, in the English-speaking country next door, is on the LIVE TELEVISED NEWS having a press conference about his crack use and then throws in some details about, in his own words, "eating pussy."

What else can one man do? If he does anything else, it's going to probably end up with him exploding on a live streaming twitter feed or something. It's practically criminal** we can't get anyone on this side of the border to take up the cause with the same sort of shambling, self-annihilating aplomb. Imagine, say, Hillary Clinton taking one minute out of her day to address the press on her need (or lack thereof) to perform cunnilingus. On ANYone, doesn't matter. PR problem immediately solved.

Plus, remembering 1993, I kind of feel like she owes us one.


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*I've always been more of a DayQuil guy.
**Let's be honest, a lot of what Mr. Ford gets up to ends up being that eventually.