Barack Obama has not so far revoked the postlapsarian state. I tell Amanda, who is less patient than I, that at least we are talking about getting health insurance to more Americans. Beats hell out of invading Iraq. But the whole health care debate has been dispiriting. What we need, plainly, is a system like those functioning in all the other so-called advanced nations: national health insurance sponsored by the federal government. What we are headed for, however, is exchanging our current awful mess for a marginally less awful one. More people will be covered but the crazy quilt of competing plans and forms will survive. When you go to the doctor, the first question will still be about insurance. It will still be expensive and confusing and some will remain uncovered. I am assuming something passes the Senate and, after the reconciliation process, makes its way to Obama and a rose-garden signing ceremony.
The measure that has now passed the House, on a 220-215 vote, with 39 Democrats joining the benighted Republican caucus in opposition, even after the adoption of an absurd and embarrassing amendment banning abortion benefits in private health plans purchased with the assistance of a government subsidy, shows pretty clearly the impossibility of doing what needs to be done. I know, I know, we have to be mature, have to face facts, can't make the perfect the enemy of the good, or at least the better--all true, all true. I am just saying it is dispiriting.
On a more uplifting note, there is the administration's decision, announced yesterday by Attorney General Holder, to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, in a federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan, a few blocks from the former site of the Twin Towers. You do not get justice in the dark, behind barbed wire at Guantanamo Bay, where ordinary people, like the nearly 3000 killed that day, are not permitted to look. He says he was tortured? Let's hear about it. Sunshine disinfects. Those opposed to the Bush administration's response to 9/11 are always asked: what do you say should be done? Well, to start, let us not invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with it. In general a law enforcement model, rather than a war model, should have been employed. Putting KSM on trial before a federal jury of US citizens in a courtroom in Manhattan seems to me just right. I'm confident the jury will listen, evaluate, judge. That is how we used to do it here and we can do it again.
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