A succinct and funny analysis of last night’s GOP debate

Romney and Perry at last night's GOP debate. (Courtesy of the Huffington Post.)

Confession: I had better things to do than watch the GOP debate last night after pedaling my exercise bike during the evening news. See, I was reading for the first time Molly Ivins can’t say that, can she? Published in 1991, how had I missed it? Here’s a quote from Ivins’s introduction:

One of my heroes is William Brann, the great populist, who edited a paper called The Iconoclast in Waco before the turn of the century. Brann, a fearless man, loathed three things above all others: cant, hypocrisy, and the Baptists. “The trouble with our Texas Baptists,” he once observed, “is that we do not hold them under water long enough.” But there he was in the Vatican City of the Baptists, and for his pains, one fine day in 1898, on a wooden sidewalk, an irate Baptist shot him in the back. Right where his galluses crossed. But the story has a happy ending, on account of, as he lay dying on the sidewalk, William Brann drew his own gun and shot his murderer to death. Me, I hoped to go like Brann. A martyr to honest journalism.

Anyway, NY Times columnist Gail Collins, who could be described as Molly Ivins without the Texas drawl, told me all I needed to know of what transpired at the Reagan Library last night. Go ahead and read it fer yoreselves:

It was a dark and stormy night.

Except in those parts of the country where it was dry and fire-prone. But what did America care about the weather when it had the chance to forget about its troubles on Wednesday night and curl up with eight candidates for the Republican presidential nomination?

The voters have a lot to figure out. What would it be like to have a president who continually tells the country he’s going to get the working class workin’? And is there something going on with Mitt Romney’s hair? The dark part is looking darker and those little white tufts around the ears are getting whiter. It makes his forehead look as if it’s levitating.

The Republican nominating campaign has thus far been one long primal scream from party members desperate to avoid making Romney their nominee. Really, they will look at anybody. Remember the Donald Trump moment? Michele Bachmann, Front-Runner? Who knows where their glazed eyes will turn next? Rudy Giuliani is now running around saying that he might get in the race “if I think we are truly desperate.”

Just the same, Collins didn’t miss Romney’s smackdown of Rick Perry:

And Romney cleaned Perry’s clock on Social Security. Young Americans, if you dream of someday running for president, try not to write any books calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme.

Read more:

The Much-Needed Bill Moyers’ Touch on Health Care Reform

In July 2006, the late Molly Ivins wrote a column promoting Bill Moyers for president. Ivins led off with these words:

Dear desperate Democrats:

Here’s what we do. We run Bill Moyers for president. I am serious as a stroke about this. It’s simple, cheap, and effective, and it will move the entire spectrum of political discussion in this country. Moyers is the only public figure who can take the entire discussion and shove it toward moral clarity just by being there.

Ivins died of breast cancer in January 2007 but I thought of her today when I read this piece on health care reform by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship. Like many Americans, I’ve been struggling to follow the progress of health care reform this time around as reported by a media still doing its best to damn Hillary Clinton and prop up Barack Obama. Barely mentioned by either the old or new media are the travesties perpetrated by the insurance and pharmaceutical companies continuously in league with the Republican Party from the 90s until today when they’ve managed to get their way with Democratic Party leadership.

Sure enough it's taken Moyers’ touch to bring moral clarity to the topic. First, he and co-author Winship nail the Repubs:

The Republican strategy is almost identical to the way they turned health care into Waterloo for Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1993. Back then, one of their chief propagandists, William Kristol, urged his party to block any health care plan for fear that Democrats would be seen as "the generous protector of middle class interests." Now he's telling the GOP to "go for the kill... throw the kitchen sink... drive a stake through its heart... We need to start over."

Next, our intrepid authors go after corporate interests:

As the Republicans fired away, big business stepped up the attack, too, their lobbying and advertising guns blazing. The Chamber of Commerce, for one, announced a major campaign of rallies and print and Internet ads to crush the White House plan for a competitive public option allowing consumers to choose between a government plan and private health insurance. In key states where members of Congress remain on the fence, the airwaves are vibrating with television commercials aimed at shifting hearts and minds away from any change that might threaten profits.

Obama does not escape criticism:

President Obama rejected the Republicans' Waterloo metaphor and mounted a massive media counteroffensive of his own. But the President has already run into booby traps of his own making and minefields laid by members of his own party, exacerbated when the Congressional Budget Office reported that reform plans, instead of controlling costs, would send the national debt further into the stratosphere.

Meanwhile, supporters who want to scrap the present system for fundamental change are staring glumly though the fog of war at a battlefield in total disarray. They fear that in the White House's desire to get a bill -- any bill -- passed by Congress, it will have been so compromised, so bent to favor the big interests, that it will be less Waterloo than water down, a steady diluting of the change they had hoped for and that America needs.

And here’s a depressing word or two regarding the successes of the pharmaceutical industry (Remember when candidate Obama pledged to rid Washington of lobbyists?):

According to the Associated Press, the drug industry's trade group PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) and the drug company Pfizer "reported spending more money than other health care organizations on lobbying in the second quarter of this year" -- $6.2 million from PhRMA, $5.6 million from Pfizer.

"Including its latest report, PhRMA has now spent $13.1 million lobbying so far this year. Pfizer has reported $11.7 million in lobbying expenses for 2009."

There’s more:

This is part of the reason, as Alicia Mundy and Laura Meckler recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, that "the pharmaceuticals industry, which President Barack Obama promised to 'take on' during his campaign, is winning most of what it wants in the health-care overhaul."

Their story describes "a string of victories" plucked from the Senate Finance Committee by drug company lobbyists, including no cost-cutting steps, no cheaper drugs to be allowed across the border from Canada, and no direct Federal government negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies to lower Medicare drug prices.

And that's not all. The Senate Health Committee is giving the biotech industry monopoly protection against competition from generic drugs for 12 years after they go on the market.

And now for the return of the fabled Harry and Louise. Moyers and Winship conclude:

No wonder the cost of reform keeps going up and up and up. Could it be that Harry and Louise are happier because, this time, they're in on the deal?

Back in 2006, Molly Ivins suggested to her readers that we write to Moyers and let him know what we thought of her idea to enter his name in the Democratic primary. I took her up on it and urged him to run. As I recall, I received a thoughtful card in response from Moyers. Too bad he declined. Seriously.