Special Comment: Legislators for Sale

Before I post Keith Olbermann’s newest Special Comment on the painful cross-roads where congressmen and senators sell their souls to corporations in order to win re-election so they can continue devoting their lives to better serve their donors rather than their constituents.

Health Care is a right. You can say that the “un-alienable right” to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is not in the constitution, and that’s true. It’s in the “Declaration of Independence” and that’s not a shabby document either and that there was some overlap between creators of the two.

And yet, as we have received the harshest lessons in the last year of what deep down we already know: we have no representatives. We’re good for photo-ops and can maybe make some changes at the local level but when it comes to national changes, we have nothing. We have nothing when banks that send the country further into the debt in order to solve the crisis the banks creator. We can only look on helplessly as companies raided Iraq and helped kill a country because there was more money to be made. And when people die because they were scammed by a company out of the health care they paid for over their lifetime, we don’t even have any feeling left for misery. We’re left numb. I know that even though I was lucky enough to get healthcare (and only by the grace of God and my mother forcing me to take care of my own well-being), this situation is unacceptable. It is unconscionable. It should make you feel sick.

At this moment, I can’t even bring myself to watch “The Daily Show” because it feels wrong to laugh even though I know the show is ultimately cathartic in itself. It’s hard to follow the politics because it’s like an intense drama that leaves you feeling like shit with an unhappy ending. And while the images of the wealthiest of the wealthy hoarding as much money as they possibly can, I keep coming back to a line from “Chinatown” that’s been rolling around my mind:

“Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”

Republicans are the easy target when they were voted out of office and have just made themselves even more laughable with their “We’re anti-Obama but lack any plans of our own”-plan. But they can still make Democrats dance to their tune Maybe it’s because they’re envious of Republican success in spite of non-existent ethics or perhaps these Democrats never had any principles in the first place and they only put a “D” next to their name because some consultant told them that’s how you get to the Capitol where you can be paid off and when you tire of pretending to care, you can hang up your spurs and quit being the gun-for-hire and hire the guns yourself when you get a job on K Street.

Sadly, the first half of Olbermann’s latest Special Comment mentions hardly any of this and it shows the commentator at his worst: the one-dimensional joke that his detractors have set up to make him look like a blow-hard who gets his ratings off of making liberals feel a little catharsis by going after the big bad conservatives who can receive humorous derision and intense vitriol depending on what’s the most popular response.

Thankfully, in the second half Olbermann sets his sights on the “Blue Dogs” but he goes in to less depth and approaches it with disappointment, as if only Democrats had the will to do good. It was like Superman let him down. At that point, you have to wonder if Olbermann is playing to the crowd because the man isn’t stupid. Baiting Bill O’Reilly for ratings is dubious but ultimately harmless.

But where is the commentary on this pattern we’ve seen again and again of the Democrats shouting out glorious speeches of change only to make the modest and insignificant amount of progress and hoping that will be good enough for re-election. But they’re also out of excuses because with a majority in both houses and a President in the White House and the political will for health care reform, there’s no reason that health care shouldn’t have a major overhaul unless it’s truly lobbyists who run this country and the best we can hope for is that they’re as ineffectual as our “representative” government.

I’m not turning libertarian. I think that the theory of a Republic is still sound and that perhaps our biggest misstep was allowing money to run the game for the funds required to run a re-election campaign. Olbermann doesn’t even comment that for all the money Max Baucus has received from the health care industry, how much do you need to win Montana? What fierce political battles need fighting in Montana, a state with far more terrain than population.

I’m also not taking the road of “high-minded” indifferences where I look down on the people for their stupidity and their failings of watching television and buying fast food and every other cliche you can name about why Americans let corporations run their government. But those who make these self-righteous claims can only subsist on being able to see the strings of the puppeteer for so long until they realize that even though they can “see” the strings, they’re just as helpless as everyone else.

We’ll get by as we always have. The previous generation continues to lose faith in the current generation and the current generation refuses to take any advice, no matter how sound, that the previous generations have to offer. And yet we continue to move forward. For all the claims of political apathy in America, we still reach out to others, try to improve, and perhaps our biggest failing is, as comedian Louis C.K. noted, “Everything’s awesome and nobody’s happy.” Sometimes we just need a little strength and Olbermann’s impassioned plea at the end of this Comment, whether genuine or insincere, should feel cathartic to everyone who knows that health care is a right.

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