Right Wing Nut House

Megan McCardle has a disturbing interview with Paul Campos, the author of The Obesity Myth (republished as The Diet Myth) that smashes the idea that obese people are necessarily more of a drain on health care resources than thinner people.

McCardle:

With health care in the news, everyone’s looking for magic bullets to save money. Obesity seems to be a growing favorite: wouldn’t it be great if we could make everyone look like Jennifer Anniston, and be cheaper to treat? There are a lot of holes in this theory–the morbidly obese are very sick, but die young, while lower levels of overweight/obesity aren’t so well correlated with poor health. But still, the idea’s power seems to be growing every day.

This week, Health Affairs published a new study showing that–quel surprise!–obesity accounts for an ever growing share of our health care costs. They put the number at about 10%. So I decided to ask Paul Campos, the author of The Obesity Myth, what he thought. The book, which everyone should read, argues that the health benefits of losing weight are largely imaginary; that we are using “health” to advance our class bias in favor of thin people, particularly thin women.

Following are some selected cuts from the interview that should open you eyes about the efficacy of studies touted by government health professionals as well as the difference between being thin and being healthy.

On trying to control health care costs by reducing the number of obese Americans:

It’s a terrible idea on all sorts of levels. There are three big problems with attempting to control health care costs by reducing so-called “obesity.” First, it’s a fake problem. Second, the solutions for the problem are non-existent, even assuming the problem existed. Third, focusing on making Americans thinner diverts resources from real public health issues.

Is being fat really being unhealthy?

The correlations between higher weight and greater health risk are weak except at statistical extremes. The extent to which those correlations are causal is poorly established. There is literally not a shred of evidence that turning fat people into thin people improves their health. And the reason there’s no evidence is that there’s no way to do it.

So saying “let’s improve health by turning fat people into thin people” is every bit as irrational as saying “let’s improve health by turning men into women or old people into young people”. Actually it’s a lot crazier, because there actually are significant health differences between men and women and the old and the young — much more so than between the fat and the thin.

Campos calls this obsession in the public health community over obesity “a moral panic” and debunks the statistics:

OK, the CDC honchos and the authors of this study you referenced are in hysterics because the obesity rate, so-called, has roughly doubled in the last 30 years. But let’s consider what that actually means.

Adding to the absurdity of all this, people with BMIs in the mid to high 20s actually have the best overall health and longest life expectancy — ,more so than those in the so-called “normal” BMI range.

Debunking diets:

If you put people on starvation diets, which is what these methods do, of course you’ll get huge amounts of weight loss. Then most or all of it will be gained back, which among other things is a recipe for congestive heart failure. I’d love to do a “reality” show on the contestants on shows like The Biggest Loser three years down the road. But that would probably be a little too much reality.

Gastric bypass is the most radical method available for weight loss, and it basically doesn’t work. Everything else is even less successful, though usually not quite as dangerous.

Finally, increasing government coercion to get obese people to lose weight.

It’s the classic pattern of moral panics. As public concern about the damage being done to the fabric of society by the folk devils increases, increasingly intense demands are made on public officials to “do something” about the crisis, usually by eliminating the folk devils.

I mean, there’s no better established empirical proposition in medical science that we don’t know how to make people thinner. But apparently this proposition is too disturbing to consider, even though it’s about as well established as that cigarettes cause lung cancer. So all these proposals about improving public health by making people thinner are completely crazy. They are as non-sensical as anything being proposed by public officials in our culture right now, which is saying something.

There is perhaps no part of government that bases its policies on flawed research, unproven assumptions, and is driven by politics more than the public health sector. From the Alar scare that cost apple growers $100 million to the myth that salt causes high blood pressure, our public health bureaucrats have not been as helpful as they should be in contributing to the health of Americans.

Beyond the question of how effective they are, there is the growing realization that altering personal behavior to conform to what some health professionals believe to be necessary for good health results in a loss of freedom for the individual to manage their own lives without interference from the government.

The excuse to intervene in such personal decisions as what we should eat or drink will be even more prevalent once national health care is a reality. The logic that eating certain foods or partaking in some behaviors results in an individual using more than one’s fair share of scarce health resources will be more than enough to tax, to ban, to regulate, to dictate the kinds of foods that should be available to us. It may even result in penalties if we fail to abide by these strictures, such as not treating people whose behaviors or diets are self destructive.

When I was 280 lbs (42 lbs ago), I felt tired all the time, caught colds often, and found it very hard to get around. I’m still about 50lbs overweight but am losing the weight without dieting. It’s a slow process - no more than 2-3 lbs a month, sometimes none at all. But I’m eating better while still enjoying all the foods I ate when I was 280. I figure that there are so few true pleasures here on earth - one of them being good food - that to shortchange yourself, even at the expense of your weight and ultimate life expectancy, isn’t worth it. Better to live well than make yourself miserable by dieting all the time. If that results in a few fewer years on this planet, so be it.

This may not be your attitude and that’s fine. That’s your choice. But the point is, it should be our choice, not the governments. This is the same mindset that forced auto manufacturers to make it impossible to start a car without buckling up. Is buckling up a smart thing to do? Sure. But the idea that the government is forcing you into a behavior - no matter how much money it saves (no evidence it does due to different injuries suffered while wearing a belt), - that isn’t and shouldn’t be the point.

Where does it stop? At what point do government diktats on health or controlling behavior become so onerous that the very idea of individual responsibility and personal freedom is destroyed? I am not that much of a libertarian to believe that ingesting anything we please - including drugs that are currently banned or illegal - should be the standard under which we measure our personal freedom.

But government comes perilously close to unnecessary intervention in our personal lives when it determines for itself what is “healthy” and what is not, and then tries to impose that idea on us by reducing our freedom to decide for ourselves.

To call the hysterically exaggerated, paranoid rantings of some talk radio personalities and conservative bloggers “whining,” as David Frum does in a series of now 4 articles on conservative despair, is being generous. These overwrought ninnies are the flip side of lefty loons who spouted about Bush turning the US into a Nazi state.

I wrote dozens (perhaps hundreds) of posts about this culture of hysteria on the left during the Bush years with many on the right wholeheartedly agreeing with me. I posed the question more than once, “If I really believed the country was descending into a fascist dictatorship, don’t you think that most of us on the right would be the first on the front lines to combat this evil?” Perhaps it’s time to turn that question around and ask if our freedoms really are being lost, what are you doing sitting at home writing spittle flecked rants about the dangers of dictatorship rather than taking your rifle and going out to battle this scourge?

So once again, I take my rationalist pen in hand and attempt to inject some reason into critiques of the Obama administration and debunk the hysterics who speak of the Republic as if it were in the past tense - or headed there full speed ahead.

Positing the notion that we are marching toward a socialist dictatorship or are losing our freedoms under Obama is just not supported by the facts. And Frum wrote in his second “Whine” post exactly what I have been writing and thinking since Obama took office:

The extremity of conservative pessimism attacks the foundational rules of the American political game. Since 1865, the United States has enjoyed amazing political stability. Americans have achieved this stability via tried and tested rules of the road, including the unquestioning acceptance of election results, an acknowledgement of the basic good faith of the other political party, and an absolute acceptance that people of all points of view are committed to the shared constitutional system.

If I lived in a country in imminent danger of a Bolshevik or Fascist seizure of power, I’d be a cowardly fool if I failed to use every means to prevent it, including violence if need be. If it were true that our political opponents wanted to impose tyranny on the United States – if (as Rush Limbaugh said the other day) a vote for the other party was a vote for “totalitarianism, dungeons, and torture,” then what patriot could possibly abide a political defeat?

Happily, none of those things are true. As wrong and harmful as the Obama administration’s plans are, the administration is playing by the rules of the game. To agitate people into thinking otherwise is to corrode the foundations of the American constitutional regime.

It is also to act and look like sore losers. If America has been sliding gently but irresistibly into soft despotism, where were all the valiant defenders of liberty before November of 2008? Soft despotism begins to look less like a profound sociological trend, more like undulations of the sine curve: It’s despotism when we lose, freedom when we win. We should have more confidence in the people and the country than this. We should also have more charity to our political opponents – who after all are contending with hideous problems bequeathed to them by … by … well suddenly we Republicans cannot seem to remember who preceded Barack Obama in office.

Frum is picking on Mark Levin whose book Liberty and Tyranny has sold 900,000 copies. Levin had a few choice words in reply but frankly, the Great One should know better. Frum’s point about conservatives being relatively sanguine when Bush passed the prescription drug bill, as well as No Child Left Behind is spot on. Sure, there was some grumbling and name calling, but Levin and other pop conservatives never spoke in apocalyptic tones about the massive intrusion of the government into the education of our children nor did many righties see the expansion of Medicare as the forerunner to today’s attempt to take over the health insurance industry.

This is what I’ve been trying to get across to those few conservatives who read this blog and are open to argument. Barack Obama is not a communist, or a socialist, or a fascist, or an anarchist. He is a child of the New Left, and most if not all of his agenda reflects ideas and programs that have been floating around liberal salons, think tanks, and symposiums for nearly 40 years, if not longer.

These ideas weren’t socialist then and they aren’t socialist now. Taking over the auto industry to save the jobs of his union supporters is stupid economics, not a slippery slope to communism. Buying preferred stock in big banks is government strong arming, not the end of capitalism in America. Spending and taxing us until we are a second rate economic power is bad governance, not the prelude to an attempt by Obama to destroy the country in order to set up a dictatorship.

I refuse to accept the liberal critique that this kind of opposition to Obama is largely race-based. That’s absurd on its face. Surely there is a small minority who harbor hate for Obama’s skin color, but this kind of paranoia and hysteria about Obama’s agenda is being fed by the need of many to be part of a great drama where our heroes on the right must save the Republic from its enemies. In short, the Levins, Limbaughs, and the rest of the pop conservative brigade who are standing up and screaming “Fire” in a crowded theater because some idiot lit a cigarette, are turning their listeners into a bunch of 11 year old drama queens.

It’s not enough that our political opponents have ideas that are wrong headed, illogical, resistant to reason, and profligate with the people’s money. These ideas must be evil, insidious, and transcendentally malignant - all the better so that the self-appointed watchdogs of democracy can ride to the rescue and save us from the Evil Lord.

It is, at bottom, an adolescent critique of the Obama administration because, as Frum points out, it substitutes emotion for reason, hyperbole for measured responses, and wildly accusatory rhetoric for a pragmatic approach to combating bad ideas.

Politics is not an exercise in self-expression. It’s an exercise in persuasion. The targets of that persuasion are not the already persuaded but the as yet unpersuaded. It is their concerns that need to be understand, their questions answered, their values appealed to. Harry and Louise did not denounce Clintoncare as fascism. They explained how it would harm the people it purported to help, and they made their case in calm commonsense terms and tone.

In today’s debate, conservatives could show that a public option will invite private employers to end their coverage and dump their employees into the government plan. Americans are practical people, and they’ll respond to practical sense. Because Americans start with a bias in favor of free enterprise, they’ll respond especially well to sensible conservative arguments. But if we elevate everything to an immediate 11 on the Spinal Tap sound amplifier, we’ll lose, and not just elections, but the deepest values we are trying to defend via elections.

In this year 2009, it often seems that liberals offer policies and conservatives offer emotions. True, the liberals offer bad policies and conservatives offer understandable or anyway pardonable emotions. Rick Santelli expressed something real and true in his famous CNBC outburst.

I think Frum is a little harsh with Levin, whose book - what I’ve read of it - is much more than a dark, emotional screed against Obama. There is an elegant defense of the free market as well as a passionate portrayal of conservatism as the antidote to Obama’s government overreach. But Levin can’t leave it at that and be successful. Talk radio is all about eliciting an emotional response from the listener, and urging conservatives to counter Obama with reason and pragmatism rather than gut busting anger and hyperbolic fear mongering cannot be done and still remain atop the talk radio ziggurat.

If I seem a little harsh with some of my fellow conservatives who see Gorgons and dragons behind every tree in Washington it is because the perception is gaining ground - fed by a media eager to falsely portray all conservatives as unbalanced weirdos - that we can’t be trusted to run the country because we are too angry, too emotional to govern dispassionately. I know that a majority of conservatives are not into the kind of over the top nuttiness exhibited by many on the right. This moronic cacophony is especially prevelant on the web where these memes are endlessly recycled and regurgitated in a kind of perverse feed back loop. It has become a contest to see which blogger or commenter can outdo the last one in spouting a riot of nonsense about Obama’s dark plans to cancel elections, round up opponents, even turn the country over to the Muslims.

Obama Derangement Syndrome is well established now. It is up to those conservatives who are more interested in returning to power than in despairing over how the United States has become a socialist country, to rationally critique the abominable policies of this administration, and regain the high ground in the debate.

Otherwise, we will continue to wander in a dark, depressing wilderness - one of our own making.

My latest piece is up at AIP and its about how health care reform reminds me a lot of my ex-wife:

I think it would be extremely helpful if Americans began to think of President Obama’s health care reform proposals the same way I think of my first wife. The more you know about it, the less you like it.

And the fact that it lacks common sense, spends too much of your money, makes decisions that would be better left in your hands, and is attractive on the outside while being insidiously rotten on the inside is also reminiscent of my former beloved, although at least my ex-amour was a great dancer and a decent cook. Otherwise, I would recommend a Vegas divorce for this monstrosity of a bill.

One of the major selling points that the president used for his national health care reform was that it would lower insurance premiums substantially. He promised on his campaign web site, in the second presidential debate, and in the third debate:

“If you have health insurance, then you don’t have to do anything. If you’ve got health insurance through your employer, you can keep your health insurance, keep your choice of doctor, keep your plan. … And we estimate we can cut the average family’s premium by about $2,500 per year.”

We Americans can be a pretty cynical lot when it comes to believing politicians so it is a wonder that we actually fell for this little prevarication from Candidate Obama.

We know now that the prospects of keeping your insurance depends on how willing you are to overspend for it. That’s because Candidate Obama’s promise to lower your premiums by $2500 are about as believable as my ex-wife’s explanation for why she spent $1500 on a dress. “But it was on sale…” just doesn’t cut it.

Supporters will probably tell me I’m all wet, that we will save money on our premiums, that we won’t be forced on to the government plan, that costs will come down simply by government waving a magic wand,…

Sorry, but you can spin what’s in the bill all you want and it won’t change the practical effect of what is implied in adopting many of the measures in the bill. This is what supporters refuse to address.

Is there anything in the bill that would require you to drop your insurance that you have now? No - but the practical effect would be to make it prohibitively expensive and force you to choose less coverage for more money - unless you are eligible for the subsidy that doesn’t cover you if you’re part of an employer based insurance plan.

Faulty numbers, insidious requirements, stealth mandates - its all there.

Do I have a viable alternative? No, I don’t. But others do and, as I have said before, it is criminally negligent of the Democrats to present this monstrosity of a bill as the only alternative - that there’s no other game in town. Baucus is looking at some of those alternatives as I write this, although without including a public option in his compromise, it is doubtful that Obama will sign it much less the liberals in the House support it.

I have to believe there is a third way - somewhere. There has got to be a combination out there of public and private that will cover the uninsured and those with pre-existing conditions, bring down costs intelligently, while keeping the best of the private health care system in place, and not cost us $1.5 trillion I refuse to believe that this is not possible - even in our current partisan atmosphere.

I agree we cannot go on as we are now. Those who say we don’t need reform are crazy. Rising health care costs will bankrupt us in 20 years. But to support this bill is to support catastrophe for our health care system as well as for our fiscal situation. Don’t believe me? Ask other Democrats who are the ones standing in the way of passing this bill, not Republicans.

Don’t tell me this is as good as we can do “realistically.” I don’t believe that for a moment. They are big boys and girls in the White House and Capitol Hill. If things are as bad as they say - and they are, except it’s not quite the “emergency” we are being led to believe - then the judgment of the people who believe that this is a crucial issue will be severe if nothing is done.

And, I daresay, the blame will go to both parties. The GOP cannot be accused of “obstructionism” - not with the gigantic Democratic majorities in both chambers. But they will be blamed for not offering solid alternatives. Republicans should be out there every day touting their own plan. Instead, they have decided to treat it as a PR gimmick rather than a serious legislative initiative.

And I will repeat - Obama is not taking the lead on this as he should. He is not being realistic in his criticisms, nor is he doing much besides jawboning from the sidelines. His one effort at compromise - the health commission - was shot down by the CBO as being meaningless in controlling costs. Face it- the guy is an empty suit; all talk and no action.

In that respect, if health care reform is dropped or goes down to defeat, President Obama will be as much to blame as anyone.

Nothing says crazy quite like the idea that someone is better off receiving services from a person who shares the same skin pigmentation.

Obviously, a black accountant is better off having black clients while a white lawyer is better suited to handle cases brought by other whites, this idiotic thinking goes. It is racial preferences run amuck and has taken what is actually a sound idea and extended it to radically ridiculous lengths to serve the interests of racialists, hate mongers, and pea brained politicians who see political advantage in trying to curry favor with “victims of white oppression” or in playing up racial differences.

Therefore, it’s not surprising that the Obama administration would want to see that “underrepresented” minorities in the health care field would become part of what Linda Chavez calls a “racial spoils system” that will give educational preference to minorities in health care fields because everyone knows that people will be healthier and get better treatment if their doctors share their racial and ethnic background.

In 2002, the Institute of Medicine released a study entitled “Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care” that sparked a flurry of accusations that minority patients, especially African-Americans, receive bad health care because their doctors were biased.

The study said that “some evidence suggests that bias, prejudice and stereotyping on the part of health-care providers may contribute to differences in care.” But as Dr. Sally Satel, a highly respected physician and author, observed at the time, the “evidence” in the study was thin. ” ‘Some,’ ’suggests’ and ‘may,’ ” she wrote, “are all the kinds of words authors use when the data are flimsy and reputations are at stake.”

There is no question that African-Americans, on average, die younger and have poorer health than whites. What is less clear is why that is the case. Socio-economic class and behavior both play an important role. Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black males between the ages of 15-24, for example. Obesity, drug and alcohol use, and other behavioral factors play an important role in determining overall health. But will insisting on preferences for African-American students applying to medical-school admission improve health care for blacks? Not likely.

There is not one scintilla of evidence that black doctors treating black patients will make black people healthier. But when have facts ever stopped the racialists from seeking preferences based not on ability or aptitude, but rather the color of one’s skin? You either have what it takes to be a doctor or you don’t. The same is true for nurses, and anyone’s hands I am forced to entrust with my mortal coil.

I don’t care if my doctor is black, brown, green, or six shades of chartreuse. I don’t care whether the physician is from Delhi, India, Peshawar, Pakistan, Colombo, Sri Lanka, or Dixon, Illinois. When I’m in an emergency room after being involved in a car wreck, I just want to be assured that the attending physician knows my shin bone from my elbow bone, is fully qualified as a result of a medical meritocracy, and isn’t the recipient of preferential medical school policies that promote based on the accident of birth that gave one person more melanin than someone else.

I support affirmative action as it was originally intended. But the idea that all things being equal in educational or employment opportunities, preference should be given if at all possible to those who have been the historic targets of discrimination has fallen by the wayside in favor of out and out quotas by schools and large corporations who fear being sued for discrimination more than they value fairness and merit based policies. And this cockamamie idea that preferential consideration should be given applicants not due to ability but due to skin tone or whether one’s loins are cloven, not cleft, is a rank injustice against all Americans.

A society that recognizes historic differences in equal opportunity but seeks to overcome disadvantages for some by disadvantaging others is not the kind of society envisioned by the Founders nor those who fought so hard to make the Constitution’s words about equality be a source of inspiration and not hypocrisy. Martin Luther King and most of the mainstream civil rights activists at the time believed in an Affirmative Action that recognized merit first, race second. Today’s race baiters and hate mongers have that notion switched around entirely and instead, use Affirmative Action as a club to make a mockery of merit altogether.

The notion that a white doctor can treat me better than a black doctor, and vice versa, is so nonsensical as to be beyond belief. I either have the flu or I don’t. The same goes for just about everything else connected with medical care. Medicine is a science that makes judgments as a result of empirical facts based on testing and experience. The idea that a white doctor would miss a virus, or a bug, or some other condition, or prescribe the wrong medicine, or cause any harm by omission or commission because he/she is not the same color as the patient is idiotic on its face.

Should medical schools actively seek out qualified minority candidates? Abslutely yes. But not everyone has what it takes to be a doctor, and admitting unqualified candidates based on race while other, qualified candidates are refused will not improve the health care system, will not improve the life expectancy of blacks, but will result in fewer doctors.

And in the immortal words of Dirty Harry, “That’s a helluva price to pay for being stylish.”

I have a long article coming out tomorrow in Pajamas Media on the Gates matter that will look at why everyone in that little drama acted the way they did. It is my belief that in some ways, we are programmed to respond in racial situations and that it’s like that because we just can’t bring ourselves to really talk about race in a way that would start to change the dynamics between the races.

Case in point; Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic:

I feel pretty stupid for going hard on this, and stupider for defending what Obama won’t really defend himself. I should have left it at one post. Evidently Obama, Crowley and Gates are talking about getting a beer together. I hope they have a grand old time.

The rest of us are left with a country where, by all appearances, officers are well within their rights to arrest you for sassing them. Which is where we started. I can’t explain why, but this is the sort of thing that makes you reflect on your own precarious citizenship. I mean, the end of all of this scares the hell out of me.

Coates is troubled by the attitude of his fellow citizens:

When we think about the cops, it’s scary, on one level, to conclude that a cop can basically arrest you on a whim. It’s scarier still to think that this is what Americans want, that this country is as we’ve made it. And then finally it’s even scarier to understand that no president can change that. It’s not why he’s there. He is there to pass health-reform–not make us post-racist, or post-police power, or post-whatever. Only the people can do that. And they don’t seem particularly inclined. Here is what the election of Barack Obama says about race–white people, in general, are willing to hire a black guy for the ultimate job. That’s a big step. But it isn’t any more than what it says.

Coates, a very smart, very reasoned liberal who happens to be African American. His attitude toward the police has been influenced, then, by living as a black man in America and all that implies when it comes to his experience in dealing with what historically has been the heavy handed oppression of police directed against African American males.

Is Coates programmed by his experience and by society to respond in this way? I think so - just as Gates, Crowley, and Obama were all programmed to respond the way they did.

The fact that Coates sees the American people as giving the police the green light to harass African Americans is also a programmed response. I would agree that the American people don’t seem inclined to challenge the racial divide in this country but only one who has experienced oppression first hand could lay the blame for that on some nebulous attitude on the part of citizens that arresting people “on a whim” is good and then try and connect that attitude to carrying a concealed firearm. The two issues have nothing to do with each other - unless you’ve seen the dark underbelly of racism first hand and can imagine worse.

From my PJM article:

The facts of the case are a fascinating example of how race divides America. Police, as authority figures, have a notorious history in African American communities — sometimes deserved, sometimes not. It appears from unimpeachable eyewitness accounts that in this case, despite Sgt. Crowley being an expert in how to avoid racial profiling and diversity training, the perception on the part of Professor Gates was that he was being singled out for being black.

Of course, Gates had no idea that Officer Crowley had such a stellar reputation or possessed such tolerant credentials. All he knew was his experience as a black man in America and his assumption that if he had been white, the police would not have asked for his ID.

We’ll never know if that assumption was correct. Just as we’ll never know if the anonymous woman who called the police after seeing Gates try to break into his own home would have done so if she had glimpsed a white man trying to do the same thing. We can assume the best or the worst from all involved and, within the context of our flawed understanding of each other, assure ourselves that we are correct.

The point being, all the actors in this little drama have their perception of the incident colored by what divides us. The actions of everyone were programmed by the rules under which we currently interact as white and black Americans. Gates felt his dignity attacked — an anathema to whites who can’t understand how he could fail to appreciate the police looking after his property. For his part, one might wonder how much more patient Crowley could have or should have been with Gates before arresting him. No doubt he acted professionally. But even with someone as evenhanded as Crowley apparently is, the nagging suspicion that if Gates had been white he would have somehow been treated differently is hard for many to shake. That is the trap that history has set for us and is one from which we refuse to release ourselves.

The president has been forced to backtrack so precipitously for his “stupid cops” comment that he is tripping over his Democratic friends on the Hill who are backtracking on health care reform. He is putting a bandaid on the cut by doing what we do best when confronted with our racial divide in such stark, and open terms; he is finessing the situation by setting up this little Kabuki play with Gates, Crowley, and him sitting down like drinking buddies and tossing down a few beers at the White House.

Left unsaid, as always, will be the real things that divide the races. But that’s the way it has always been in America - even with an African American as president.

Obama’s press conference was not aimed at the recalcitrant members of his own party who are balking at passing health care reform. For some reason, he can’t quite bring himself to do much in the way of traditional arm twisting and private lecturing that has been the hallmark of successful presidents in the past.

Instead, his message was aimed at the American people who are beginning to doubt the president can deliver what he promised and are becoming leery of the plan as it is emerging from Congress.

Jane Sassen of Business Week:

While insisting that his own proposal to cut the amount of tax deductions wealthy taxpayers could write off for their charitable contributions would be better, the President said such a measure would “meet my principle” that the costs should not be borne “by families already having a tough time.”

Of course, providing answers to tough funding questions wasn’t the aim of the press conference, as least from the White House point of view. The goal was to make a convincing case to keep public support for the plans from eroding. And at that, he may well have succeeded. The prime time hour may not have done much to move the needle in Congress, where the nitty-gritty proposals are being hashed out. But the President probably helped tamp down some of the increasing doubts that the American public has expressed recently about health care reforms as details have emerged. And that, after all, was his real job for the night.

Meanwhile, the senate’s #2 Democrat Dick Durbin says that the reform bill will not be taken up before the August recess as Taylor Rushing of The Hill reports:

“We’re going to take a little longer to get it right,” Durbin told The Hill when asked about the oft-stated goal of a vote on or before Aug. 7, when a monthlong Senate recess begins. “Initially we had hoped for a full vote by then, but I don’t think it’s going to be possible.”

Delaying the vote until after Labor Day would all but erase hopes of getting a bill to President Obama by mid-October, since the House and Senate versions would have to be reconciled in conference negotiations - assuming they pass their chambers.Durbin said the bill was still largely on track, however, denying that momentum has stalled.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “This is a complex challenge, and we’re taking a reasonable approach with it. It would be better if some Republicans joined us instead of just criticizing.”

Just wait until Democratic congressmen and senators start talking to their constituents about this bill while they are home during the recess. They will no doubt get an earful. Also, several independent groups are planning massive ad campaigns during the recess targeting Blue Dog Democrats as well as those in districts that were carried by George Bush or John McCain.

The question has been raised by the bill’s supporters that even bad reform is better than no reform at all. Such would be the case if there weren’t other options, other ideas out there - none of which got any hearing whatsoever by the progressives in both the House and the Senate who were handed the ball by the president and have created this monstrosity on their own.

It is simple minded to dismiss these options as “more of the same” tax cuts and the like from the GOP. The  GOP alternative that some liberals were surprised in that it was fairly comprehensive, would not have raised taxes on anybody, rich or poor, and in the end, probably have induced more people who are currently uninsured to get coverage. There were many problems with the bill - the tax credit for families to buy insurance was ridiculously low, for example - but it addressed almost all of the same problems the Democrat’s bill does including coverage for pre-existing conditions, Medicare reform, portable insurance, and a host of other elements the Democrats want us to pay a trillion dollars for.

The Wall Street Journal had the bare bones outline:

The nexus of their plan is redirecting the $300 billion annual tax subsidy for employment-based health insurance to individuals in the form of refundable, advanceable tax credits. Families would get $5,700 a year and individuals $2,300 to buy insurance and invest in Health Savings Accounts.

Low-income Americans would get a supplemental debit card of up to $5,000 to help them purchase insurance and pay out-of-pocket costs. They would have an incentive to spend wisely since up to one-fourth of any unspent money in the accounts could be rolled over to the next year. The combination of the refundable tax credit and debit card gives lower-income Americans a way out of the Medicaid ghetto so they can have the dignity of private insurance.

The great majority of Americans with job-based health insurance would see little more than a bookkeeping change with the Patients’ Choice plan. But implicit in the policy is the acknowledgment that our system of tying health insurance to the workplace is not working for upwards of 45 million uninsured Americans.

As I said, the bill is far from perfect and some of it makes assumptions as unreasonable as are in the Democratic bill. And the GOP bill isn’t the only alternative game in town. There are dozens of proposals - equally untried as anything in the Democratic bill I might add - floating around that have never been examined, studied, or debated by Congress because Obama wants his reform RIGHT NOW - despite the fact that a careful vetting of ideas in the Democratic bill or any alternative has not been done.

Why can’t my liberal friends see that this is no way to reform 1/6 of the economy? This massive, untested, unproven, Gorgon of a bill is being rushed through with nobody reading it, no one measuring the consequences, and no one weighing the effect on ordinary people’s lives. And it being rushed through not because if we delay 6 months or a year, anything bad will happen. It is being rushed for the sole and exclusive purpose of giving the president of the United States a legislative victory. Politics trumps sanity in this case. And if you want the bill now, you are part of a Kabuki play that almost certainly is going to cost more, cause more problems, and perhaps even make things worse than if we slowed down and looked at the health care problem rationally.

But there are many good ideas that haven’t even been examined because the liberals have a monumental distaste for the free market. Government cannot order costs to be lowered any more than King Canute could order the tide to recede. Market based incentives, both logically and intuitively, would work better, more efficiently, and more cheaply than the simple lowering of Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals the liberals have in mind, not to mention the “intelligent” rationing of services we are told that will result from passage of this bill.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi was bragging to reporters that she has the votes right now to pass a health reform bill in the House. That’s a lie, as two Democratic congressmen confirmed tp Deidre Walsh of CNN :

Nancy Pelosi’s statement Wednesday that Democrats have the votes to pass health care in the House. “I think the Speaker was well intended because she was hearing optimistic things, but I don’t believe there are the votes on the floor as of right now,” he said Wednesday.

Hill said he and other Blue Dogs were meeting again Wednesday night with Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman. Hill said they’re “making progress,” but still have significant issues to resolve. Nancy Ann DeParle from the White House was involved in an earlier meeting with Blue Dogs, he said.

Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak, who is trying to change the bill to make it clear it would not use taxpayer money for abortions, also disagreed with the Speaker.

“It would be easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than to pass this bill,” said Stupak.

Stupak said Democratic leaders can’t lose 40 votes if they want to pass the bill and predicted “she [Pelosi] would lose more than 40 on the right to life issue alone. There’s just no way.”

Stupak said he doesn’t want to block the bill, but wants leaders to agree to add language on the abortion issue before it comes to the House floor.

Pelosi has a revolt on both her right and left, with the progressive caucus getting angrier with each concession made to the moderates.

In the end, the bill might die a death by a thousand cuts as the final effort may contain so many objectionable elements to so many Democrats that it won’t have a prayer of passing.

The lack of leadership on this bill by the president has been astounding. While he has occasionally met with members at the White House, his efforts have fallen far short of whipping his reluctant party into line. He makes speeches. He holds town halls, He goes before his friends in the press.

But the nitty gritty political work he is leaving to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and at least 5 committee chairmen. While no one has ever doubted the president’s skills as a campaigner, it is apparent he doesn’t know how to lead. He can’t distinguish a difference between campaigning and governing.

And there is a real possibility, no longer remote, that he will fail to bring any health care bill to a vote this year.

It is sometimes easy when you live in the virtual world of the internet to look at people like the Birthers or Truthers and dismiss them out of hand as a small minority of lunatics who are best left alone to wallow in their paranoid kookiness.

Such might be good advice for dealing with those who believe we never landed on the moon, or who think that we have dead aliens on ice at Area 51. But, as I warned my fellow conservatives in this post about the Founding Freeper’s call for “revolution” and removal of all elected representatives from the president on down, we ignore some of these groups, including the Birthers, at the peril of having conservatism severely damaged by having their ideas associated with the mainstream right.

Yes, there numbers may be small relative to the whole. But they are actively committed to spreading their lunacy far and wide and are gaining converts and cash as I write this.

The question then becomes do we try and isolate, chastise, and ultimately drive out the paranoid purveyors of utterly fantastical notions of Obama’s origins while they are still a small enough group that a concerted effort could succeed? Or do we wait and see how big they get before acting, thus risking a backlash against the right from the voter?

To prevent many diseases from harming our health, we inoculate ourselves so that an illness will not develop. I propose something similar in dealing with the Birthers. For my part, anyone who leaves a comment on this site, on any post, that advances any birther “theory” will be banned from accessing my writings.

Some might think this a bad idea in that I will forgo “debate” or perhaps not allow a Birther to be convinced otherwise. That’s nonsense. My experience with Birthers has been that they don’t want to hear any contrary evidence, that they have closed their mind so completely to the truth that arguing with a brick wall would be easy by comparison.

Besides, for most Birthers, it’s not about discovering the truth. It is about delegitimizing the president. For months they demanded to see the president’s birth certificate. When the state of Hawaii released a “Certificate of Live Birth,” we heard from the Birthers that it wasn’t good enough, or it was a fake. “All we want is to see the president’s birth certificate,” they innocently ask. And they take the president’s reluctance to do so - indeed, his fight in the courts to prevent the release of it - as “evidence” that there is something amiss.

I don’t blame Obama for fighting it. It is an insult to the presidency, to begin with. And the fact that no other president or presidential candidate in history has been asked to “prove” they are citizens is a personal insult to Obama.

I have little doubt that racism plays a role in this for some, but for most, it is a continuation of a streak of radical paranoia that has afflicted a subset of modern conservatism in the post-World War II era. The anti-Masons, the bugaboos associated with the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, Breton Woods, the Jews, the Catholics — it is a long, inglorious list of people and organizations around which has grown paranoid conspiracies of the most outrageous sort.

I’ve quoted Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” several times on this site. The opening paragraph of that essay applies to our current situation:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

Hofstadter misread the Goldwater movement entirely, but so did most liberals at the time who failed to appreciate what energies had been released as a result of the Arizona senator’s candidacy. To ascribe Goldwater’s success to the paranoids was an extreme oversimplification but typical of the blindness demonstrated by the left to what was happening to conservatism below the surface. (I wonder what Hofstadter would have made of the unhinged, paranoid and radical nature of opposition to Bush by many lefty bloggers over the previous 8 years?)

The point is that Hofstadter’s description of the Birthers (and others who believe everything from Obama being a communist to his desire to “destroy” America) is spot on. “Heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” are the hallmarks of the Birthers, and even if Obama were to release his birth certificate, they would find it a fake or demand something equally idiotic as “proof” of his citizenship.

You cannot debate them without legitimizing their arguments. They are not rational so logic and reason have no effect on their thinking. Like the 9/11 Truthers who are a cross cultural, equal opportunity fraternity of both left and right nutcases, they must be denounced in as strong language that we can muster. They must be belittled, humiliated, laughed at, raged against, and verbally hammered unmercifully until they are beaten back into the shadows and dark places from which their fantasies emerged.

And now, Rush Limbaugh has joined the Birthers in asking to see the president’s “long form” birth certificate. The “news” site World News Daily - one of the biggest boosters of the Birther movement - reports on Limbaugh’s conversion:

On his show today, Limbaugh told listeners, “As you know, I’m in the midst of another harassing audit from New York State and New York City for the last three years. We’re up to 16 different ways I have to prove to New York City and state tax authorities where I have been every day – not just work week – but every day, for the past three years.”

He continued, “Barack Obama has yet to have to prove that he’s a citizen. All he has to do is show a birth certificate. He has yet to have to prove he’s a citizen. I have to show them 14 different ways where the h— I am every day of the year for three years.”

Do my fellow righties still think this is just a fringe group of paranoids? Whenever I criticize Limbaugh on this site, I get an army of conservatives telling me he is the heart and soul of the conservative movement. If so, what does that say to the rest of us who utterly reject the Birther nonsense? Are we out of step with the mainstream? Or has Limbaugh proved once again that he is a clown, an oaf, and a shallow panderer to the fears and anger of his listeners?

Mark Ambinder offers this in his post, “Should the GOP Take the Birther Threat Seriously?”

That’s the thesis of the First Readers of NBC News, after viewing this astonishing clip from a town hall meeting that Rep. Mike Castle held in Delaware for his constituents. What’s most notable, to me, at least, is not how scared Castle looked or how passionately the woman argued for Barack Obama’s foreign birth. It was the reaction of the audience, a good portion of which erupted into cheers and youbetchas.

[...]

To the extent that one can conclusively prove such things in our postmodern age, this claim has been extremely thoroughly debunked. The birther movement may be premised on a fictional belief, but it is savvy: birthers now wear the term “birther” as badge of honor, as if they were a persecuted minority — which, come to think of it, is one mechanism for solidarity in the face of evidence to the contrary.

[...]

This is, at once, a fringe movement and something greater. It’s fringe because no important Republicans believe it, and most are offended by it. It’s greater because some fairly prominent local lawmakers are beginning to sign birther petitions.

At least nine members of Congress have cosponsored a birther bill that would require prospective presidents to affirm their U.S. citizenship. What we don’t know is how widespread the belief is among Republicans — and even if the belief is confined to a narrow minority, whether the belief will spread as Republicans begin to pay closer attention to electoral politics in 2010 and 2012.

Now that Rush has picked up the Birther standard, expect other Pop-Cons like Hannity, Beck, Coulter, and more to start pushing it. If they do, they are playing with fire. Pandering to paranoids has the historically nasty habit of having their delusions stick to you like glue. Charles Lindbergh found that out to his detriment when he embraced the “America First Committee” before World War II. When the war broke out, he was ignored by Roosevelt and his fame took a permanent hit.

I am open to any and all ideas on how to marginalize these kooks before conservatism itself becomes a victim of the Birthers unbalanced lunacy. We can no longer turn the other way when confronted with Birther blather. Since they won’t listen to reason , shame and humiliation would seem to me to be the best way to closet them with the other nutcases of American politics.

UPDATE

I was right to compare Birtherism with a disease. It seems to be spreading.

First Limbaugh, now Liz Cheney who refused to denounce the Birthers on Larry King:

After King showed video of the crazy birther who disrupted a meeting with poor GOP Rep. Mike Castle, demanding he acknowledge Obama was born in Kenya (that’s one birther claim); and after Carville denounced them as a “poor, pathetic” fringe group, King gave Cheney a chance to distance herself from them. But Cheney demurred, telling King the Birther movement exists because “People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas.”

The rarely shocked Carville seemed briefly speechless, and even King, not known to be the most combative interviewer, tried a second time to get an honest reaction from Cheney — which I read as expecting her to separate herself from the crazies. But Cheney repeated her talking point about Obama inadequately defending the nation overseas. Unbelievable. Carville called her on it, accurately: “She refuses to say, ‘This is ludicrous,’ because she actually wants to encourage these people to believe this.”

Absolutely nuts.

Some Freeper named Jim Robinson has an off the deep end post up at Free Republic that illustrates in a nutshell why no one is taking conservatism very seriously these days.

You have to read the whole thing to grasp the underlying hysteria, the exaggeration, the misperceptions, and the paranoia, but a few choice passages should suffice.

It is entitled “If we could get millions of Americans to march on Washington, what would we do?”

It cannot be denied that the central government has become destructive of our unalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness and our rights to live free. The government is no longer responsive to we the People. They have stretched and shredded the constitution to the point that they have illegally seized for themselves virtually unlimited powers over the citizens and act as if we have no rights and no powers of our own. They are acting without our consent.

First, I could have lifted the exact same verbiage from any of 50 lefty blogs while Bush was in office. It was stupid then and it’s stupid now. Positing the idea that we are unfree or living under some kind of authoritarian regime is so far beyond the pale of rationality one wonders if this guy sits in the dark, cradling his gun, waiting for the secret police to bust down his door.

Gross exaggeration, hyperbolic, hysterical, paranoid, full of nonsensical statements that fly in the face of reality - and that’s just the second paragraph.

Our Founders established that when our government becomes destructive of our rights then it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

We have reached the point where the government’s long train of abuses and usurpations has achieved absolute Despotism, therefore it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for our future security.

Therefore, We the People of America choose to exercise our right to throw off and alter the abusive government by peacefully recalling and removing from office the President of the United States, the Vice President of the United States and all U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives effective immediately.

Oooh goody! A revolution. Can I play too?

An interim provisional Chief Executive and congressional representatives will be established as follows:

The Secretary of State shall immediately assume the office of interim Chief Executive. The Chief Executive shall appoint and the interim Senate shall confirm an interim Vice President.

An immediate election shall be held within each state legislature to appoint two interim senators to represent each sovereign state.

A special election shall be held by all states within 30 days to elect interim members of the House of Representatives.

Elections for regular government offices shall be conducted in November, 2010 as previously scheduled, except that elections will be held for all elective offices, including President, Vice President and all U.S. Representatives. U.S. Senators will be elected per class schedule by the various state legislatures.

I suppose Obama, Biden, the cabinet, 100 senators and 435 Congressmen are just going to take one look at that million crazies this guy wants to bring to Washington and turn over the government to…who? Who is going to appoint this “Provisional Chief Executive?” No doubt Mr. Robinson who, as the leader of this revolt of patriots, will also be responsible for “convincing” our elected leaders to leave town.

No matter. Just what kind of government does this new Founding Fool want to establish?

The Constitution of the United States must be kept intact and must be adhered to and strictly followed by all government entities as originally intended.

As it was originally intended? Well, that solves the Obama problem. Mr. Robinson can sell him into slavery.

We must restore and reestablish the sovereignty of the people and the states and restore the constitutional balances between the central government, the various states and we the people. The constitution severely restricts government powers and guarantees unalienable freedom and Liberty to the people.

For an ignoramus, he actually got pretty close - to a third grade understanding of the Constitution. Perhaps defining “freedom and Liberty” might be a start so that we can figure out what’s “unalienable” in those vague concepts, as well as telling us how to “restore and reestablish” states rights and the “sovereignty” of the individual (which hasn’t gone anywhere as far as I can tell). But of course, that would require a mind not entranced with its own lunacy.

Then come the specifics: Repeal the 16th and 17th amendments, abolish the IRS (hooray!), transfer federal land, buildings, and military bases to control of the states, kill social security, get rid of abortion rights, the Fed,…

Well, you get the picture. He concludes with this ringing call for revolution:

Need lots of help with this document, folks. Please chime in. Would love to see a committee formed of members of every state to complete and finalize it. Then we should form and send delegates to a special national congress to work out the kinks and plan its presentation and execution.

This concept is an entirely peaceful altering of our despotic government per our unalienable right and duty. No where do I call for violence. The only force I call for is the force of numbers. We need millions of our citizens to sign on to this petition and execute its provisions. Will require millions to march on D.C. to block the government’s ability to do business as usual. This is our right and duty as Americans.

Yes, every American has a right to make an utter, complete ass of himself. That right is protected by the Constitution as surely as the right to sit in the dark with a gun waiting for Obama’s goose stepping brownshirts to arrest patriots like Mr. Robinson is guaranteed by that document.

The problem with all of this isn’t that the guy is a loon whose understanding of what America is all about is that of a 6 year old. The problem is in the comments to this post, as well as comments I’ve seen on just about every big conservative blog out there that support and mimic these extraordinarily idiotic and laughably exaggerated claims of what the government has been doing since Obama took office and how these actions affect our personal liberty.

There will always be a certain portion of both the right and left who are basically nuts. The hysterically exaggerated dangers of a Bush putsch were written about endlessly by the left for 8 years. Now it’s time for righty crazies to crawl out from under the rocks and dark places where they’ve been hiding to make conservatism look like an ideal home for kooks, paranoids, and other unbalanced denizens who inhabit a creepy reality of their own making that bears little resemblance to the real world.

Conservatives will laugh this kind of thing off as an aberration. But I am telling my fellow righties that we ignore this crap to the detriment of the rest of us who oppose the administration’s actions. With pop-cons like Hannity, Beck, Coulter, and other conservative celebrities mouthing some of this nonsense (while implying even worse) on a daily basis, more and more of the base are turning into unhinged, screaming maniacs who believe America is being “destroyed” by Obama and the liberals.

This screed is symptomatic of the sickness of thought and reason that afflicts many conservatives today - more than we are prepared to acknowledge and far more than one would normally expect from a philosophy that supposedly prides itself on prudence, rationality, and probity.

You can dismiss Robinson and his unhinged followers. But they aren’t going away and their influence can only grow if we ignore them.

UPDATE

Ooooh my bad. Jim Robinson isn’t just any ordinary schmuck. He is founder of Freeperland.

If I were to seriously analyze Robinson’s thoughts in that post, I would say that anyone who advocated the kinds of changes he does would make Obama look like a piker in the “change” department. Robinson’s ideas are beyond radical — they are ill-informed, impossible, and reactionary.

How reactionary? Robinson posits a government that does not return us to our constitutional roots but rather to a pre-constitutional system not unlike the Articles of Confederation. Anyone who can’t see that in all of his state’s rights bullshit doesn’t know much about history.

Someone should wake Mr. Robinson up and inform him that we are a continental, 21st century industrialized nation of 300 million people and not an 18th century agrarian coastal republic of 7 million.

Not that it would make much difference to Robinson. We have to revolt to ban abortion and toss out social security and the IRS.

This gorgon of a bill isn’t dead - not by a long shot. But it has been stalled by the inability of Democrats to come together and pass it.

Blue dogs are beginning to talk with Republicans about overhauling the entire bill. Liberals think it isn’t going far enough and will vote against any bill that doesn’t have a public option. Fiscally responsible members are terrified of adding to the deficit. And even the president has acknowledged that his deadline of getting it done before the August recess may be impossible.

I might add that there is precious little from the White House except speechmaking. This president apparently doesn’t know how to govern. He has handed responsibility for getting this bill passed to Pelosi and Reid while he stands on the sidelines kibitzing.

Bottom line: No one is in charge. Committee chairmen have their own ideas about what should be in the bill while Blue Dogs and liberals are rejecting their formulations and want to substitute massively.

Here’s Jennifer Rubin this morning in PJ Media:

“Back to the drawing board,” announced Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on health care reform.  Indeed, it seems that in one short week, the single most important item on the president’s agenda is in need of some critical care.

[...]

The president rushed to the microphone on Friday afternoon to assure the country the patient was fine, just undergoing some expected surgery and far from terminal. Absent was any mention of his August deadline, however. He appeared miffed at “Washington” and the “24-hour news cycle.” He took no questions, likely because he had few answers to the hard queries. (Why is his own party in revolt? Why would he raise taxes on small businesses? Why don’t people like the idea of a “public option” as much as they did a few months ago?) Despite Obama’s lecture and show of bravado (”this is going to happen”), all signs pointed to the demise of the House Democrats’ trillion dollar, soak-the-rich public option scheme. And it is far from clear what replacement plan might be offered.

Revolts are breaking out all over the place and both Reid and Pelosi are incapable of putting out the fires. Again, it should be stressed that Democrats may be  waking up to the fact that they have a pretty damned ineffective president - one who doesn’t lead and is beginning to sound like something of a whiner.

Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie writing in the Washington Post , actually use the “C” word to describe Obama:

From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. “Give it to me!” the president egged on a Michigan audience last week, pledging to “solve problems” and not “gripe” about the economic hand he was dealt.

Despite such bravura, Obama must be furtively reviewing the history of recent Democratic administrations for some kind of road map out of his post-100-days ditch.

So far, he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter. Like the 39th president, Obama has inherited an awful economy, dizzying budget deficits and a geopolitical situation as promising as Kim Jong Il’s health. Like Carter, Obama is smart, moralistic and enamored of alternative energy schemes that were nonstarters back when America’s best-known peanut farmer was installing solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Like Carter, Obama faces as much effective opposition from his own party’s left wing as he does from an ardent but diminished GOP.

Carter never had a clue about how to govern in Washington and neither does Obama - something many of us warned about before the election. Anyone with an ounce of sense knew his grandiose promises about changing the way Washington does business were as empty as Harry Reid’s head. It wasn’t just his inexperience. It was his rhetoric being incapable of matching reality that was most telling.

And now, Obama has apparently dropped the idea of passing a health care bill before the August recess. What will emerge after Labor Day may be nothing like what is being talked about today - scaled back, no public option, a bigger small business exemption, and no real reform of Medicare. Instead, look for expanding Medicaid and S-Chip at the state level to cover the uninsured and perhaps some fiddling with Medicare payments.

In that form, it has a chance of passing with GOP help. But unless Obama can pull off a miracle, his big plans for health care reform are going to become as extinct as the dinosaurs.

As I have said many times over the nearly 5 years I’ve been blogging, I am not a journalist. I have no desire to be a journalist, to be thought of as a journalist, to think like a journalist, or ever become a journalist in the future.

It’s not that I hate journalists. With two brothers in the profession, I greatly admire their work and the work of many of their colleagues. I am perhaps a little more sensitive to the difficulties in bringing the news to the public than some, while a little harsher than others when laziness, or stupidity lead to erroneous or horribly biased stories.

I am a firm believer that much of what the right sees as bias in mainstream journalism is simple laziness on the part of reporters. It takes an effort to be as objective as possible and many journalists either fail to try or simply don’t want to be bothered with it. This is due to an underlying arrogance in many of the more prestigious newsrooms that feeds egos too full of self-importance to recognize how they are betraying their craft by allowing personal biases or animus to color the presentation of the news.

I believe that this explains why a solid, experienced journalist like Walter Cronkite, who passed away yesterday at the age of 92, may have become the “most trusted man in America” but who ultimately discarded his life’s work to become an arbiter rather than a purveyor of news.

The distinction is important. As Managing Editor at CBS, it was Cronkite who helped choose the stories, shaped them, had a big say in when they would be slotted on the newscast, and ultimately, used his on-air personae to impart an emotional context to what was being reported.

This, despite the fact that Cronkite was a newsman’s newsman. He worked in city newsrooms, and for the wire service UPI where he became a famous war correspondent, risking his life several times to get the story. When Ed Murrow called in 1950, Cronkite moved to the best news team on television and began anchoring important events like the political conventions. His coverage blew away NBC’s Huntley and Brinkley and he became a star.

Cronkite took over the anchor chair from Douglas Edwards in 1962 and the change from journalist to “Uncle Walter” was not immediate. But over the years, as TV news on the “Big Three” networks grew in importance, Cronkite’s editorial decisions - whether he intended to or not - not only shaped the nation’s agenda, but also subtly gave the news a “point of view.” Racism is bad. Viet Nam is wrong. The Space Program is good and can do nothing wrong.

We are used to this kind of “drama” today where the news perhaps doesn’t take sides overtly but nevertheless contains stories that through visuals and copy, impart the “correct” way for the audience to interpret the news. This is news as show biz not as political advocacy. In order to capture eyeballs for the 3 or 4 minutes most people will watch cable news at a time, editors spice the stories with built in conflict — good guys, bad guys, heroes, and villains. In many respects, they play to the ingrained biases of their audience rather than creating their own.

Print media isn’t much different. Except for the New York Times, which one can hardly make a case in defending their overt advocacy for liberals and Democrats, there is a better balance at many newspapers in reporting stories. But the way the story is usually told also contains many of the same elements of drama, and leading the reader by the nose to a particular conclusion. This makes for more interesting reading. It hardly makes for good journalism.

The tale told by two disasters reveals the difference between journalism and show biz. The reporting of the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and the coverage of Katrina in 2005 bookend two eras in journalism where the primary function of the reporter changed from news gatherer to newsmaker. With only phone lines that connected the country in 1963, the big three networks did as good a job as was possible in rounding up eyewitnesses, switching to their Dallas affiliate (where a young Dan Rather got noticed by CBS brass), running archival Kennedy footage, interviewing the rich and powerful in Washington and New York, doing the man in the street gig, and generally scrambling like hell to fill air time suddenly denuded of commercials.

It was hit and miss coverage - and it was riveting. The salient point was that the networks never lost sight of the story - Kennedy’s death. Sometimes it was trivial. At times, sublime. But the reporters and anchors allowed the natural drama of Kennedy’s death to drive coverage.

Contrast that with Katrina coverage in 2005. Despite satellites, cell phones, lightweight portable cameras, and a lot of “gee whiz” technology, what was the Katrina coverage about? What drove it?

It certainly wasn’t about the victims. It wasn’t about the effect of the storm on New Orleans. Nor was it about how the city was responding to the disaster.

The storyline of Katrina coverage - even on Fox News - was the lack of response by the Bush Administration. Every news item - from the rumors of babies being raped in the Superdome to the looting - was placed in the context of a Bush failure. Villains were made out of Director Brown and Bush. Heroes were made out of Mayor Nagin for his emoting on national television and sometimes the reporters themselves who never failed to pat their colleagues on the back for enduring such wretched working conditions.

The difference between the two eras in journalism were giants like Cronkite who created a whole new job for themselves; the National Sage. In this capacity, the anchors decided which stories were important, which should be ignored, and how to shape the news so that people were informed “the right way.” The key is that they took this responsibility on to themselves. While very cognizant of their influence, they sought to use it to promote their idea of the “greater good.” This was not done as overtly as it is today, but it had a greater impact because so many more people were watching.

It was perhaps the nature of the medium that this should have been so. But to have the kind of “news as drama” filter down to newspapers is one of the primary reasons for their decline today. People used to read newspapers to find out what was going on, not how to think of an issue. Perhaps they figure if they wanted that kind of news reporting, they may as well watch the cable nets. At least they have film and attractive people to read the news to them.

There is no denying Walter Cronkite was a great man. But for what he and others did to the craft of journalism, he should be criticized, not commended today.