No Joy in Obamaville

It should be, for those of us who have opposed this president's policies, a supremely enjoyable moment. The president's signature initiative, known far and wide as Obamacare, appears to be a miserable failure, from conception to execution. And it's increasingly evident that the scope of the failure is going to be gigantic. Not to put too fine a point on it -- our betters have screwed the pooch.

So why am I not enjoying the moment? Well, there are a number of reasons:

• Schadenfreude isn't really cool. Rubbing someone's nose in their own stupidity might give you a temporary sense of satisfaction, but continuing to do so diminishes you. No matter how much scorn Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi deserve, and they deserve a metric ton of it, seeing them brought low is at best a palliative.
• Obama triumphed, especially in his re-election bid, because he is a deeply cynical man who will make any argument and use any tactic at his disposal to win. While a lot of his supporters are only now starting to understand this, the damage that he's done to our politics will have repercussions for the rest of my life. One of the reasons I've written so extensively about Chicago politics for the last five years is that Obama represents the triumph of that malignant brand of political thinking. While I'm heartened to see that it might finally be brought low, the nationalization of Chicago politics leaves a lot of destruction in its wake.
• Cleaning up the particulars of this mess will be a huge, huge, huge undertaking. The larger issues involving the Obamacare law concern the ways in which it fundamentally transformed the economics and the incentives of the health insurance system in this country. The reason so many people are going to lose their existing policies is that the statutes essentially demand it. The insurance companies have ordered their business plans and their operations around these statutory requirements ever since John Roberts green-lighted things year. You simply can't just say "oh never mind" at this point. The system we've lived with since World War II is gone now.
• I don't know what I'll be paying for health insurance premiums for 2014 yet. We'll find out soon, but I'm certain it's going to be more expensive now and the potential out-of-pocket costs will continue to rise. Since I'm getting older and I've had my share of health problems already, what's potentially coming could be very problematic for me personally.
• I wish that I had reason to be confident that the politicians who are generally on my side of the aisle were up to the challenges ahead. I don't see a lot of evidence of that.

After that cheery synopsis, here's a little something that might make you laugh, at least a little:

"I've seen a eunuch with a more functional front end." That, and a Hammurabi joke to boot. Might as well smile a little, I guess.