An Agitated Psalm To The Curse Of Déjà Vu
Somewhere in my sordid past I must have made a spate of grievous errors; terrible miscalculations in both vocation and idle interests. It is the only way to explain my obsession with politics, which started frighteningly early, before sex or drugs or even rock and roll. I have no idea what possessed me, perhaps television or the NY Post or Dick Nixon going down in flames. And then along the way, in a long stretch of misbegotten youth, I lost my mind and studied journalism, becoming focused on “covering” such things. Luckily, after several and varied odious pressers, I realized full-time journalism was the way of damnation. So I stumbled here; almost two decades ago now; all leading up to one morbid afternoon of watching the speaker of the house give a PowerPoint presentation about some shit-addled falderal called “The American Health Care Act: Part Forty-Six – This Time It’s Personal”, and thought to myself, what the fuck is the point of humanity, if it comes to this?
We have now reached the nectar of pure nihilism as an alternative to absorbing the information that comes daily from Washington DC. Even with a raving lunatic TV character in charge and the Republicans running everything in sight, we are presented with yet ANOTHER health care bill—to be bandied about with I am sure the type of hyperbolic frivolity that led to the last one, which tossed the country into the kind of cauldron that would force an Ayn Randian wonk like Paul Ryan to spend nearly 40 agonizing minutes droning on about how it does this and that, and if not for its passing the streets will run red with our blood.
I am sure those who voted for Donald Trump were under the impression that somehow, beyond his entertaining nature and always bizarre ranting at all hours on the teen-scene Twitter machine, things would be radically different around here. But look, mama, they talkin’ health care laws agin!
So the party that slowly began to take over due to the outrage of one health care law is now presenting us with another, and their argument is that this steaming pile of shit is better than the other one because the other one is so horrifying it will sink the whole of the universe. Of course these same idiots told us about death camps and the sinking of the universe in 2010. The universe is still here and there is nary a death camp, although Ryan is now using his clicker to switch PowerPoint slides revealing more details about his fucking giant government takeover of health care to replace the last fucking giant government takeover of health care.
Makes me long for Saturday morning tweets from The Donald accusing the previous president and the government he now runs of wiretapping his fancy Fifth Avenue tower because Ed Meese’s towel boy needed radio ratings and made the whole thing up. Of course, unlike his Birther ruse, El Douche forgot he isn’t a reality TV dork anymore, he’s the goddamn leader of the free world and has direct access to and power over the machine that supposedly “wiretapped” him, but instead spends seven days and counting trying to convince the great unwashed that he needs an investigation. And the great unwashed, fully accepting that his tax returns are still under double-secret probation audits and are forthcoming, are eating it up. All of this, of course, is another in a series of ham-fisted Manhattan Real Estate Style smokescreens to make us forget the White House is being run by the Kremlin.
Back to Paul Ryan, who is starting to look like that scene in Woody Allen’s Love & Death wherein he’s dancing away with the grim reaper, because, hell…why not? There is no fucking way on the Good Lord’s green earth there are enough votes in the senate for his turd and slowly the congressional “freedom caucus” that shut the government down to defund the last health care bill ain’t buying any of it; no matter how many kiss-ass dinners the president hosts for Ted Lyin’ Cruz.
But oh, wait, another one-party ramming of a bill is a-comin’, because despite no hearings on this puppy, there was a secret all-nighter within Republican committees to prepare this for a vote. Sound familiar? Switch Democrat for Republican and it’s 2010 all over again.
Still to come; the three little letters that will make everyone cringe: CBO. The Congressional Budget Office has yet to let us all know how much this boondoggle will cost, which is why supporters of this monstrosity are trying to dine-and-dash this fucker before Easter recess and the sweat begins to form on the foreheads of the weak. Meanwhile, no one on the right has the balls to just say, “Hey, guess what? Government run national health care cannot work here, because this is not Canada, it is a republic made up of states, and each one has a different mechanisms to administer this gigantic headache and this is why the last one has not worked out as planned, and if people have to die, well then, people are dying in the Middle East every day, shit we just killed over a dozen kids in Yemen two weeks ago.”
This is what Paul Ryan really thinks, but he is stuck in this hypocritical netherworld of repeating past mistakes, because the monosyllabic chief executive in the yellow hair-hat told everyone he had a fancy, beautiful, terrific gangbuster health plan where everyone is covered and it’s cheap and it washes your dog and gives you head and makes your car payments and tickles your grandma’s fancy and zippity-fucking-doo-da we’re all great again! And now he’s stuck standing in front of live cameras and pointing at a slide show telling everyone about ANOTHER HEALTH CARE BILL and we’re stuck, or check that, I’m stuck watching it.
Yeah, I made some grievous error somewhere along the line. But it ain’t nothin’ compared to whatever salt shaker this poor bastard Ryan knocked over.
May Allah have mercy on his tainted soul.
Do yourself no favors and “like” this idiot at www.facebook.com/jc.author
James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, “Midnight For Cinderella” and “Y”. and his new book, “Shout It Out Loud—The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon”.
