The Obama Administration Could Soon Be Seeing 'Trails...

For anyone keeping an eye on the U.S. political scene as it has devolved over the past couple of months, health care would seem to be the only issue on the national agenda. And rightly so: In seeming to stake the success of (at least) his first term on the comprehensive reform of that system, President Obama has focused everyone’s attentions on the outcome of this whole mess. Still, as Roll Call reported on September 8 (tomorrow), “just because health care is all anyone wants to talk about, Democrats aren’t giving up on pushing a number of other controversial measures this fall.” According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), “Key items … [include] delivering on health insurance reform and clean energy, providing jobs by improving our infrastructure, and reining in the behavior on Wall Street that contributed to the economic downturn. We also intend to pass legislation that makes college more affordable and invest in critical domestic priorities.”

(Good. Luck.)

With current political efforts so focused on this health care thing, there are, really, only two possible outcomes for the fall session: 1) Obama gets his health care legislation passed — undiluted — and declares himself a victory. In this scenario he spends his political capital wisely and earns his party a nice return, thereby rendering himself able to complete the balance of his Presidential agenda. 2) Obama fails — by which we mean that either he can’t force through a health care bill in any form, or he passes something that reads to the lefter side of his party like an intolerable compromise — in the health care department and is forced to declare political bankruptcy. In this scenario, we can look forward to two or three years of Presidential timidity, at least in terms of his domestic agenda.

That is, unless of course, the President can deflect a healthy dose of negative bipartisan attention elsewhere (preferably toward the far-left, who will, in the wake of such a disaster, do their best to undo the moderate coalition that will be blamed for sinking health care reform). Which is to say that, in the event of a health care failure, he’ll need to figure out a way to send enough non-Obamian bad vibes through the U.S. political sphere that he might just be able to resurrect his first term. For that, Obama can rely on Sen. Reid, with his seemingly benign batch of proposals, or he can go all out, to the far-left end of his party, and dispatch Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) to re-introduce HR-2997, the Space Preservation Act of 2001, and have him start screaming and yelling about Congress wasting time.

Unlike subsequent Space Preservation Acts, the 2001 version includes a clause (Sec. 7, para. 2b) that calls for “a permanent ban on space-based weapons of the United States…includ[ing] exotic weapons systems such as

• (i) electronic, psychotronic, or information weapons
• (ii) chemtrails;
• (iii) high altitude ultra low frequency weapons systems;
• (iv) plasma, electromagnetic, sonic, or ultrasonic weapons;
• (v) laser weapons systems;
• (vi) strategic, theater, tactical, or extraterrestrial weapons; and
• (vii) chemical, biological, environmental, climate, or tectonic weapons.”

As fun as the rest of all of that is — subparagraph (i) in particular — it’s that bit about chemtrails that might just save President Obama. If you’re unfamiliar with these suckers, here’s a primer. For those unwilling to click (or, in the case — as the author of the Web site implies — that link is disappeared by the Feds), the operative stuff: “What some people had dismissed as mere ‘jet plane exhaust‘ … are dismayed to realize that chemtrails are indeed the toxin-laden aerosols that have been described here and at other web sites since 1998 and they are not being sprayed for any benign or national security reason as the disinformation peddlers would have you believe.

“Nothing brings home the comprehension of the New World Order depopulation agenda than the realization that you and your family are also on the ‘useless eaters’ (Henry Kissinger) elimination list.”

That New World Order depopulation agenda? The ‘useless eaters’? The chemtrails? Those’d be the purview of the conspiracy junkies who think that there’s a secret organization running the world making eugenically informed decisions about who should get to live what sort of life, and carrying out their agenda via chemicals hidden in the contrails of jet airplanes. In other words: just the sort of folks who need a good reigning in from the Obama administration.

Also: Nothing makes a failure look like less of a failure than the reinforcement of the idea that someone — importantly, someone from the wing of the party that will be on the attack — is more unfit for office than you are. And Kucinich and his seeming belief in the contrail conspiracy makes for a great target.

Near as we can tell, if Obama wants to get his Presidency out of the weeds, it’s the Space Preservation Act or martial law. Unless, of course, he wants to bust some heads and get that health care thing through.

On the House Schedule page that’s attached to its web home, the U.S. House of Representative employs what might normally be considered a … creative description of its summer recess. It’s fitting then that, in a year when the phrase “summer district work period” could actually be applied without a wink, a nudge, and an unfettered trip to the beach, the work being done by House members seemed to be on the painful side of things: The Democrats — dispatched to promote the President’s health care plan — were met with angry resistance from mobs of conspiracy hacks, while the Republicans — dispatched to prove that the citizens of the United States don’t want anything to do with that sort of reform — were working just as hard to drum up protest against the administration’s plans.

According to the New York Times, first term South Carolina representative Jim DeMint is doing his part. “Taking questions from a friendly crowd of 500 people here the other day,” reporter Katharine Q. Seelye writes, “Mr. DeMint did little to correct their misimpressions about health care legislation but rather reinforced their worst fears.” At the suggestion that the administration’s health care proposal would “give the government electronic access to bank accounts,” for example, Seelye reports that DeMint offered a reply that implied the Obama team might look to do just that — or to perpetrate a host of any other conspiracy-nightmare, big-government crimes: “This is about more government control,” Sellye quotes DeMint as saying. “If it was about health care, we could get it done in a couple of weeks.” It begs the question: Is a man who, along with his colleagues, seems unashamed to leave his constituents with such a dramatic example of wrong-headedness fit to govern?

For their part, the Democrats (with the ever-charming exception of Barney Frank) have been no better. As my Unfit colleague Josh Rosenblatt has pointed out, the pathetic effort put forth by the party in defense of the health care plan serves only as an example of its continuing inability to take a political stand (thanks for the legacy, Bill). In fucking-up so royally, they may have ruined more than just the pending health care legislation. Which begs the question: Are such cowards fit to govern?

Post-Bush II, the Republicans are generally returning to their familiar complaints about the size and reach of the federal government. In terms of health care this manifests itself as death panels, socialism, and Obama requesting access to your bank account. Federal involvement in everyday life is, to these folks, something of a parasitic action — never mind the fact that they rely on the stuff to pay for the luxury trimmings that come with being a representative of the people. Meanwhile, the Democrats (or at least the head of that party) hope to effect the most major collection of policy changes since the New Deal while remaining on speaking terms with the entire country, right and left. Politics may indeed make for strange bedfellows, but it’s not often that everyone squeezes into the Lincoln Bedroom all at the same time.

For both parties, it seems, extra-ordinary duplicity is the order of the day.

Either way, it’s all wrapped-up in the two-party system that serves to monopolize what used to be the American Experiment — and the fact that the notion that very few of our politicians are actually fit to serve is an open acknowledgment that is broadly used by candidates to justify their asking for votes seems to beg for a change in business is usual. This, of course, is both the issue that Obama ran on and the reason that some of us worried that whatever fresh start he promised (earnest or not) would be short-circuited by the system. Worse, things are so stacked against outsider political parties that a defensible organized challenge to the status quo works better as a myth (see Roosevelt, Theodore and Perot, Ross).

Maybe it’s time to stop worrying about the set-up of other people’s democracies and start thinking about the nature of our own. A good place to start might be with a question about why the “summer district work period” has morphed into “summer recess.”