Last year’s big news was that George W. Bush wasn’t president.
Neither was John McCain. The other guy was, the skinny guy from Chicago with the funny name and the silver tongue. Many people were not happy about this. They say he talked his way into the White House and he doesn’t know what he’s doing. They say he’s a socialist who wants to ruin our health care system with a lot of heavy-handed government intervention. And we all know what happens when the government gets involved. Curtains. Sayonara. Forget about it.
National Fiber Threatened
Fortunately, there were enough right-thinking men and women in Congress to put a stop to the awful creeping socialism that was threatening the very fiber of our national fabric. Most of these stalwarts were Republicans, the party of good sense and restraint, but also some right-thinking Democrats and one Independent, who were not about to let creepy-crawly socialism threaten the very fabric of our national fiber.
These brave men and women voted their consciences, irrespective of how much money the big health insurance companies poured into their campaign coffers. This is America, not some cheap banana republic where money can buy any result. This is America where right-thinking senators and congresspersons come together, regardless of party affiliation, and do the right thing to keep strong the very fiber of our national fabric.
A lot of ink and valuable TV time was wasted on the debate over health care reform, which politicians of every stripe agreed was desperately needed, even if only because their annoying and ill-informed constituents said it was. In fairness to our intrepid senators and congresspersons, it wasn’t always so easy to tell what the people wanted.
National Fabric Endangered
Some of them called Obama a dangerous lefty and carried placards depicting him as Hitler, that infamous socialist. Some of them stood up in meetings organized by right-thinking politicians and screamed and yelled that government intervention would ruin Medicare and Medicaid. Get the government off our backs, they shrieked, and don’t touch our Medicare.
Faced with this sort of criticism, many of the most independent congresspersons climbed upon the fence and stayed there through the long season of mindless debate. Being right-minded, they were worried about the cost of the most radical reform measures, which they said would eat away at the very core of our American values and might eventually threaten the very fiber of our national fabric.
Good Sense Prevails
After a whole year in which George W. Bush was no longer president and Dick Cheney was not the vice-president and Donald Rumsfeld was not the secretary of defense, the government was still functioning, more or less, thanks to the non-partisan patriotism of right-thinking elected representatives and high-level officials of every political stripe. As the year came to a close, it appeared that the underhanded efforts to tear the national fabric to shreds had been defeated.
The health insurance bill that the skinny Chicago socialist had tried to put over on a gullible American public was pretty well wrecked by a few alert patriots from both parties and one Independent. It was a reassuring example of how well representative government works in a free society where you get what you pay for. No one knows exactly what is still in the bill and what has been taken out because no one has read all of its 1,000-plus pages and no one ever will.
A Couple of Other Things
On Wall Street things returned to normal. Executives awarded themselves multimillion-dollar bonuses for a job well done and Bernie Madoff was inducted into the brokers’ hall of fame.
Tiger Woods showed that he has what it takes to stay on top in the celebrity game. And so did Sarah Palin, whose book was named the best koob ever by the Dyslexia Koob Club.
Altogether, it was a pretty good year — the kind of year you look back at and say, It could have been a lot worse or it could have been a lot better. Whatever.
