So, after pissing away his mandate, momentum and almost a full year on his bi-partisan pipedream and his insistance on letting the wankers in his party call all the shots, Barack Obama now suddenly announces that he does have a plan for health insurance reform after all... well bully for him. Odd, though, that he feels the need to step forward with one, given how the Senate plan according to his own statements gave him nintetyfive percent of what he wanted anyway... oh, I forgot: his other cunning plan was to allow his party to lose Ted Kennedy's senate seat (and with it that supposedly necessary 60 seat majority) to a naked Republican whose primary selling point was a red pick-up truck. Smashing plan, that.

I'm sure this new twist will go over well with the players he's inviting to his little confab, particularly the GOP representatives, who must be wetting themselves with delight at the thought of stonewalling some more while pretending to negotiate this one. If they play their cards right, they should have no problem running down the clock until 2012 when they can run their own candidate on a platform based entirely on the fucked-uppedness of the Democrats.

Also. While I find Eric Cantor to be one of the most repugnant characters on the national stage (and the competition for that honor is quite steep), he sometimes delivers a zinger. Case in poiint, in response to Obama's spokesman lamely blaming "the process" for failing to deliver on health care reform, Cantor counters:

Quick question for the Administration: Who controls the process?

CHEAT SHEET: Government 101 in 10 seconds or less:
The White House: President Barack Obama (Democrat)
The U.S. House of Representatives: Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat)
The U.S. Senate: Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat)

Touché. Obama and the Democrats own this ugly baby. They could have ignored the Republicans completely, they could have come out fighting with an agenda built on genuine progressive positions with which to bargain, but insisted -- foolishly, naively -- to bring the GOP into "the process." Much more detrimental, however, was the refusal of Obama and his wizard advisors to actually push for results that mattered, handing the whole thing over to supreme wankers like Nelson and Baucus whose motives and interests were as far removed from "delivering on health care reform" as you can get. So, spokesman Gibbs, if the process failed to deliver it was only because your boss allowed a process to be set up that was destined to fail.

Mcjoan over at DailyKos takes that one on, and closes with a very hopeful statement:

Decisive, bold, action now can and will break through the "process" Gibbs laments, and show America that Dems can govern.

Riiight. And boldly soaring out over the horizon is all it would take for pigs to show us all that they can fly.