Thinking Outside the Tiger Cage

Truth be told I’m a little bit embarrassed that I didn’t think of this before. In fact, it’s so simple we all should be a little red faced that none of us came up with this before I did. It’s that obvious and it’s a multi-purpose concept! First a bit of review.

The health care reorganization has been at an impasse since, well since the beginning. As Percy Garris said to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “don’t you want to know why?” For one thing there is no way that a Republican would vote for this short of putting a gun to his or her head.

Don’t you want to know why? It was President Obama’s idea. If they vote for it, even one of them, and it passes who gets the credit? Obama, that’s who. Who else? The Democrats. Because it was their idea. Not that there’s much there that Republicans haven’t supported at one time or another since Theodore Roosevelt was rough riding through the White House. But the public, God bless us, has the collective memory of a brain damaged amoeba. We generally remember the last person who told us something as the originator of the thought.

If I came up to you and Glen Beck today and said, “John Boehner is apparently what happens when people marry within the same family.” You’d walk away with the idea that John Boehner is an inbred, spray-tanned buffoon. If Glen Beck said the same thing tomorrow two things would happen; 1- More people would hear it and, 2-they’d all remember that they heard it from Glen Beck and think he originated the idea.

So that’s why no Republican who isn’t willing to lose his job to a challenger who could come in from the right side of Attila the Hun is going to vote for health care reform. There’s nothing in it for them politically.

Not Scott Brown of Massachusetts. He ran to be the 41^st vote against it. Susan Cohen, Olympia Snow? Nope. Judd Gregg? You’re kidding, right? Joe Lieberman might or might not. We can’t really be sure till he’s wrung every second of face time out of it. Oh sure, they’d be doing the right thing for their constituents and for the country but that doesn’t carry much weight for someone whose ego is wrapped up in being addressed as “Senator” and having that nifty office on Capitol Hill. That and politicians generally have the figurative scrotal sac of a newborn male in ice water. Present in name only. Let’s be realistic. Ain’t gonna happen.

Okay, so here’s what we do. We water-board them all till they agree to vote for health care reform! It’s not really any big deal. Almost all of them have said all along that it’s not torture, no violation of the Geneva Conventions there, no sirree. So where’s the harm?

Best case scenario, we finally get a health care bill, maybe even one worthy of the name “health care system,” with – dare I dream it? – a public option.

Worst case scenario we’re down a few members of the Senate and the survivors finally admit that being nearly drowned isn’t just “enhanced interrogation” but when it happens to them it’s bona-fide, U.S. certified Grade-A torture. No harm there that I can see.

Looks like a win-win from my vantage point. That’s the multi-purpose part.

We like to think outside the Tiger Cage here and find new solutions for today’s problems, You’re welcome.