Flawed Vessels Where They're Going

William Pfaff:

...while ex-Sen. Daschle is a reputed expert on health systems, he has also, since leaving the Senate, made a quarter of a million dollars as speaker, consultant and adviser to private health insurance and health care companies.

Does anyone think that, as secretary of health and human services, he would have recommended a new system that cuts out the private health insurance industry? The insurance companies are the ones that killed Hillary Clinton’s health proposals eight years ago. Where do you think the money goes that makes American health care the most expensive in the world? It’s not going into nurses’ salaries.

Nor are taxes a problem if you are going to be secretary of the treasury. “Whoops,” Timothy Geithner says, “how can I have overlooked 30 grand?” (Or maybe even a little more.) Maybe you can overlook it if you are a central banker or work for Goldman Sachs; I’m not in a position to know. Anyway, Secretary Geithner already is confirmed.

This is a serious matter, jokes aside. Is there anyone prominent in Washington who is not hopelessly entangled with big—really big—corporate money, that links him or her to certain industries or partisan positions?

Maybe not. Years ago, I used to rant that the only solution would be to require fixed and equal unpaid political campaign time on national and local broadcasting, and ban other paid political advertising. It’s the money for televised political campaigns that has turned Washington into a den of legalized larceny.

But then Washington has always been Another Place, as the Obamas are finding out. They are from Chicago, which has Serious Weather (more than three feet of snow a year). On one of their first days in the White House, less than an inch of snow fell on Washington and all the schools were closed. The president had Malia and Sasha underfoot.

He suggested to reporters that Washingtonians get a grip on themselves and find a way to cope with such crises. Since then, the snippy Washington comment has been that Washington snow is different; and that if the Obamas don’t like it in Washington, they can go back to where they came from...

That is the way the Masters of the Universe think as the substance of their reality dissolves around them. Any rescue that changes how they've always ruled is no rescue. When you live on Olympus, you eat the food of the gods, or be consigned to Hades.

Just ask Jimmy Carter.