From Hunter of Daily Kos:

So, let me get this straight: we’ve got Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), of all people, coming up with an “alternative” to the currently proposed opt-out public option. We’re going to be listening to the earnest proposals from Tom Carper, the senator from the great state of corporate-magic-fairyland Delaware, a state that seems at this point only to exist in order to allow America’s largest corporations to circumvent the corporate laws and taxes of other states.

Tom Carper, who is the number one recipient of corporate cash vs. individual contributions of all Democrats in the Senate, with about 44 percent of every one of his campaign dollars coming from corporate PACs — a feat that required him out-grubbing all four of the other top corporate go-to Democrats on that list, Blanche Lincoln, Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson and Max Baucus, all of whom have already gone to great and much-publicized lengths to make sure that any bill passed by the Senate is as much of a cash cow for private insurance companies as possible, and who have become regular fixtures in the attempt to gut, water down, or carve away anything that might be the slightest bit inconvenient for those companies.

That Tom Carper.

With all due respect — which is to say, next to zero — you have got to be kidding me. After months of knock-down, drag-out bullshit from the most mealymouthed, weak-kneed, PAC-funded, cowardly, out of touch, let-them-eat-cakeish, preemptively-surrendering, fake-bipartisaney corporate-humping voter-dodging cash-grubbing incompetents of the Senate, they’ve left it to the top Democratic Sen. GimmeCash McCorporatePants of all to come up with one more last-ditch effort to make sure nothing, absolutely nothing of substance might remain in this bill that would stand in the way of insurance companies continuing to gouge both Americans and the government for every last penny they’ve got.

While all the while ensuring that the number of uninsured Americans stay high (unless we’re willing to simply funnel government cash, with few strings attached, to the very insurance companies causing the problems), and that heath care costs will continue to be irrational and unsustainable. You know, as long as they don’t reach some future imaginary level of too irrational, or too unsustainable, like most of us think we reached decades ago but which the Senate still can’t quite be persuaded that they should give a shit about.

You know, seriously — we all know that a sizable chunk of Democrats in the Senate don’t want to fix America’s healthcare problem. We all know perfectly well that they consider it a threat to their corporate cash, and that in the end they don’t give a flying damn about fixing anything about the fiasco that passes for healthcare in this country, so long as they can do some bare, pissant substanceless nothing that can allow them to write up a nice victory message on their next voter pamphlet and get the hell on with their day.

But by far the thing that is most infuriating is that the Democrats don’t even try to hide it very much. This whole time the biggest political hurdle to healthcare reform hasn’t been the Republicans — a dead party that nobody expects to support or have ideas about or even understand anything, since they’re too busy locked in an internal masturbatory struggle to see who can paint the most pleasingly scary conspiracy theories and alternate realities with which to titillate the dumbest of the dumb, back home — no, the hurdle has been this phalanx of ten or so absolutely whorish corporate Dems, leaders who have never found a damn thing on any issue, anywhere worth doing unless it either weakens the government against the corporations they represent or funnel cash by the billions to those self-same companies.

Every bill they support seems hand-tailored by lobbyists. Every position they take can be guessed not by applying moronic ideological labels like “conservative” or “liberal” or “Blue Dog” or whatever, but by just looking at what legislative choice would put more cash into the pockets of whatever company has hired the most lobbyists.

Every fucking name that has come up as being “against” the public option has been one of these unwaveringly corporate whore-Dems. Every damn time. What possible sense it makes to have all of the top corporate cash-sucking Dems in positions of supposedly “watchdogging” the corporations that feed them — well, it’s not an irrational act or a conspiracy, it’s just a natural product of our Fine Upstanding Senate Traditions, and of our own Democrats, like the Republicans, very much wanting to be as crooked and corrupt and corporatist and money-grubbing as their voters will possibly let them squeak by with being, and presuming that as long as they’re slightly less corrupted, slightly less crooked than the worst of the other party, they’ll be fine, what the hell — serve the drinks and pass the bills.

A very large chunk of our greatest-deliberative-body Democrats don’t want to pass healthcare reform, they want to kill it. Our leadership, frankly, doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass either way, and all parties involved think we have the intelligence of doorstops, but I think what we would all really, really like most of all, in this ongoing and thoroughly asinine “debate”, is if this vaunted national leadership of ours would quit trying to blow smoke up our ass and tell us we’re hickory-smoked.

Fine, we get it, senators: you’re corporate whores, money-grubbing professional campaigners who don’t have the slightest interest in actually solving this problem. You seek any avenue to avoid the obvious, most cost-effective option, the one that will insure the most people and do the most to control costs, itself a mealy compromise offered to avoid plans that would work even better — but which none of the offending companies offering up their opinions and lobbyists for this debate would possibly tolerate.

But good God, could the Dems at least do us the decency of putting up a person or two “negotiating” for this legislation who isn’t among the top single-digit cash-grabbers from the very industries they’re supposed to be policing?