Monday Media Mashup (8/24/09)

(And I also posted here.)

The following appeared in the print edition of the New York Times yesterday from “Kit” Seelye on the matter of health care reform:

Any death watch for a health care overhaul may be premature. But with the White House on the defensive, and polls showing public support on the wane, advance obituaries are starting to be written.

If the effort fails, here may be some of the commonly cited causes:

- The absence of former Senator Tom Daschle, a Democrat deeply knowledgeable about health care and the Senate. (Remember that tax issues forced Mr. Daschle to withdraw in February from consideration as President Obama’s health czar.)

- A fixation on avoiding the mistakes of the Clintons. Did President Obama go too far in the other direction, ceding control – and the message – by asking Congress to come up with a plan?

- Pent-up anger on the right. Did the Obama team underestimate the rage building against the government, especially after multiple financial bailouts, and conservatives’ ability to channel that rage online and into town-hall style meetings?

- Lack of a specific bill. With some drafts circulating and others still largely in the mind’s eye of Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who head the Finance Committee, opponents have defined the debate and befuddled the public.

Whether a plan passes or fails, Mr. Obama has expended a great deal of political capital. This week, he will be vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard – and no doubt regrouping to try and keep his health plan off the obituary pages.

By the way, I’ve searched multiple times on the New York Times site, and I cannot locate this column (on page 20 in the front section under “Prescriptions: Making Sense Of The Health Care Debate”).

And that’s just as well, actually, since it represents everything that’s wrong with corporate media punditocracy.

So the first reason that comes to Seelye’s mind for the health care dustup is the absence of Tom Daschle? Is she kidding?

(And another thing – even before Daschle dropped out, I never understood exactly what it was that made him such a supposed health care expert. And considering this, maybe it’s just as well that he has remained out of the picture).

Also, I’m past the point of being fed up over pundits like Seelye complaining that there’s no health care bill. Funny, but those in opposition don’t seem to have any trouble locating the draft of the health care bill from the House, for example (I’ve linked to it a bunch of times already – it’s available from the U.S. Congress' HELP committee web site).

And the Clintons also? I don’t know how to describe how pathetic it is that Seelye and her ilk seemed to be trapped in this ‘90s time warp (and of course, we can forget about actual analysis of what’s going on with the health care town-hall disruptin’ teabaggers from Seelye also; fortunately, her colleagues Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes did some commendable work on that subject here).

I’ll tell you what – for some actual analysis on this issue, click here to read a thorough post from Media Matters (once again, a well-deserving blog does the “heavy lifting” of debunking BS and filling in the yawning reporting gaps on this story that our corporate media, once more, will not do).

And if I were Seelye, I wouldn’t make too many remarks about the obituary pages; maybe the Times didn’t publish this online because they wanted it to die a merciful death also..??

Update 8/26/09: I see Seelye's at it again here (h/t Atrios).

I also came across this item in the New York Times yesterday (on the matter of Afghanistan becoming Obama’s “Vietnam,” as it were) from reporter Peter Baker…

Richard N. Haass, a former Bush administration official turned critic, wrote in The New York Times last week that what he once considered a war of necessity has become a war of choice. While he still supports it, he argued that there are now alternatives to a large-scale troop presence, like drone attacks on suspected terrorists, more development aid and expanded training of Afghan police and soldiers.

His former boss, George W. Bush, learned first-hand how political capital can slip away when an overseas war loses popular backing. With Iraq in flames, Mr. Bush found little support for his second-term domestic agenda of overhauling Social Security and liberalizing immigration laws. L.B.J. managed to create Medicare and enact landmark civil rights legislation but some historians have argued that the Great Society ultimately stalled because of Vietnam.

As noted here…

Part of the reason Bush’s push failed was that very few people actually believed he was trying to reform Social Security and instead thought he was trying to dismantle it. Even back in 2005, despite a lack of support for privatization, the Bush administration was insisting that their efforts were a “great success.”

And as far as immigration reform is concerned, episodes such as the one noted here by Media Matters shows what I believe is the idiocy of the supposed debate on immigration reform. Then-senator Barack Obama proposed an end to a “points system” whereby would-be immigrants would have an easier time trying to obtain visas based on their education levels or work skills rather than on having close relatives already living in the United States." (Obama wanted it to terminate in five years, which to me makes a lot more sense - the bill itself set the point system to expire after 14 years.)

Now I realize I’m just a filthy, unkempt liberal blogger, but I ask you – who in their right mind is going to spend 14 years trying to enter this country as a legal citizen?

And as far as I’m concerned, the headline of this post says it all as to why common-sense immigration reform went down the drain a couple of years ago, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the Iraq war (the same is true of Social Security).

And in closing, on the matter of LBJ and The Great Society, it stalled because of the price tag and the white conservative backlash it spawned (to say nothing of the spite from some rather clueless liberals of the day who didn’t see the “tidal wave” from the “silent majority” also – maybe Vietnam killed it indirectly, but I think Baker’s attempt to draw corollaries between Obama and our two presidents from Texas falls utterly flat).

Finally, I give you the following from the blog of J.D. Mullane of the Bucks County Courier Times on Friday (hold your nose)…

The AP gives us a glimpse at the internal workings of health care, as run by the US government:

"Outside the Veterans Affairs Department, severely wounded veterans have faced financial hardship waiting for their first disability payment. Inside, money has been flowing in the form of $24 million in bonuses.

"In scathing reports this week, the VA's inspector general said thousands of technology office employees at the VA received the bonuses over a two-year period, some under questionable circumstances. It also detailed abuses ranging from nepotism to an inappropriate relationship between two VA employees.

But our current spending on health care is unsustainable. We need a government-run program to control costs.

As noted here (also pointed out by a commenter)…

The inspector general accused one recently retired VA official of acting "as if she was given a blank checkbook" as awards and bonuses were distributed to employees of the Office of Information and Technology in 2007 and 2008. In some cases the justification for the bonuses was inadequate or questionable, the IG said.

The official, Jennifer S. Duncan, also engaged in nepotism and got $60,000 in bonuses herself, the IG said. In addition, managers improperly authorized college tuition payments for VA employees, some of whom were Duncan's family members and friends. That cost taxpayers nearly $140,000.

And who did Duncan report to? Robert Howard (she was Howard's executive assistant). And who was Howard? According to linked story, he was "a political appointee who left the agency at the end of the Bush Administration."

And when anyone can identify for me the universe in which this has anything whatsoever to do with health care, please let me know.