Saturday, February 27, 2010

Health Summit: Fail. Huge.


I hate meetings.

In business I resisted having meetings until they became absolutely necessary and even then, I employed a meeting Czar whose job was to keep everyone including myself on point, wasting as little time as possible.  To me, meetings were always a colossal waste of resources and allowed for much too much tomfoolery with myself being the biggest provocateur. Any time spent in our conference room was time spent away from accomplishing tasks. I always felt the most efficient dissemination of important information was by memo, e-mail, and phone.

I am an immediate kind of guy; problem arises, solve it right now, end of story, and end of problem. Of course that may seem over simplistic and obviously if your business does anything other than put lemonade into plastic cups at the entrance to your driveway, then meetings here and there are required. But, they should be limited to strategy meetings held sparingly. My opinion, of course.

In two years as a government official, I believe I must have wasted at least one or two lifetimes in meetings listening to blow hard wannabes, party hacks and people with basically no lives, mentally masturbating the most ridiculous notions and topics known to mankind. Does anyone really have to go to a public meeting and waste two to three hours of their time listening to a bunch of taxpayer paid lawyers and professional gadflies tell them how their 36” curb cut fits into the fiscal plan of the town, state and country, and how it will effect the wetlands 10 miles downstream from their 900 square foot house? And, then having the earth shattering curb cut the purpose of which was to accommodate your 100-year-old uncle Jebediah’s wheelchair, denied and sent through some board of appeals process the end of which will most likely coincide nicely with Uncle J’s death? Ridiculous.

Summit is a fancy word for meeting. A fancier way of saying; let’s waste some really big time and money. Lord Falderal’s summit meeting met that goal in spades.

This train wreck was billed weeks in advance as a “gesture” on Falderal’s part to bring together Republicans and Democrats to reach a more common ground on the failed Healthcare Reform bills. It was in direct response to Scott Brown’s victory and warning shot that shattered the bow of the Democratic supermajority. Falderal insisted there could be a bipartisan solution to the Healthcare Reform debacle if they just got into a room and hashed it all out. It also gave him the opportunity to save a little face in living up to earlier promises to televise open meetings for all to see. No more closed door meetings.

Nice idea. Big fail though, since as usual the extremely slow learning person posing as President was once again mired in his own world of egotism and arrogance to listen to what the Republicans were saying.

It was no secret Republicans were looking to Falderal to scrap all previous Healthcare Reform bills and start all over again, a prudent idea to say the least. Falderal’s response was to present a watered down version of the original Senate version. Huge mistake.

Falderal missed a gigantic opportunity to show some actual leadership and admit he the House, and Senate may have been wrong, and get to work on a plan that works for everyone. That would have gone very far in garnering Falderal some much needed credibility.

Instead Falderal used the opportunity to scold and whip Republicans for putting him in this position. If he really didn’t want to hear what Republicans had to say, why have a summit at all? He basically talked down, disparaged, and cajoled every Republican in the room, most of whom had their facts straight while Falderal did not.

Check this clip out: (yes, it is a Fox clip but it was the only place I could find it)


Chief News Analyst at NPR Daniel Shorr is a fav of mine. I don’t care what side he leans to, after 60 years of reporting and too many awards to mention, I have large respect for him. However, for once I find myself disagreeing with part of his assessment of the summit. He believes like most, the summit was just for show. But, Shorr also said he thought Falderal bought himself a few weeks of credibility by showing he could keep command of such a summit. I think the complete opposite. Falderal showed no leadership whatsoever. He acted like a spoiled brat and made absolutely no attempt to even hide the fact he had no intention of listening to the Republican’s side of the story in the first place.

Falderal has said he is glad to have the American people see exactly what his plan entails and exactly how the Republicans feel about it and that the summit made that possible. His strategy was clear, he wanted to appear the good guy looking to help everyone out while the R’s are the bad guy and would prefer everyone who is uninsured to perish and decrease the world’s population (I love Dickens references). However, I think this strategy will prove to have backfired in the upcoming elections.

Here is how Congressman Rogers of Michigan explains the crux of the Healthcare Reform debate. This is not from the summit but a lot of the same content came through at the summit.


This summit did nothing to help the situation except give Falderal a platform on which to publicly state he will shove Healthcare Reform down all our throats through Reconciliation. It was a PR stunt intended to show he has strength over the Republicans and will exercise it by not allowing the R’s to filibuster. As I said, he is a VERY slow learner.

What Falderal did was ensure two things; his allies will get booted from office in November and there will be billions and billions wasted trying to facilitate his Healthcare Reform only to have it scrapped when the new Congress is seated next year. It’s not like the writing isn’t on the wall. Americans are ready to throw "the bums out" and they are going to. Polls from every respectable polling organization show a large percentage of Americans are ready to clean the House, Senate and White House.

I guess we can just add this to the growing list of epic fails for this President. Glad he is working so hard on the economy.


2 comments:

  1. Wow. The only thing I can say is that this blog is full ignorance and very judgemental writings. I are you really going to rag on Elliot Spitzer because of his personal life?

    Who cares what a man does in his private time because all I care about are his policies (which we both share the same thoughts on many different subjects).

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  2. Well, then I guess you are an idiot too then. You believe in the same policies as Spitzer? Piss off and find another country pal.

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