Making Sausage

There’s an old saying that if you want to continue to enjoy eating sausage never go to a sausage factory. I’ve never been to a sausage factory, but I can tell you from personal experience that if you want to continue eating chicken never go to a chicken processing plant. I still eat chicken, but I didn’t for a while.

The problem with the “health care” debate is that it has exposed the process of legislation to public discussion to far too high a degree. We get pundit after pundit opining on the current “legislation” and its flaws, when what’s being discussed is not legislation at all but is merely the latest leaked committee proposal with various lobbyist requests still in it, many of them contradictory, and all of them mostly in it for show and placed into it with the full intention they it will be stripped out of any final legislation before the issue reaches the floor.

Legislating in the United States Congress is a dirty business and, for the most part, has been kept below the radar of the American people. We don’t really want to know all of the wheeling and dealing that they do to arrive at the verbal garbage that is finally crafted into “bills” and put into law. All of the excitement over this topic has brought this process into the open, and the American people are quite properly repulsed by it.

It’s perfectly legitimate to quote Senator Snuffbottom as saying, “I’m against the public option,” and then write an editorial to the effect that, “Senator Snuffbottom is an idiot for being against the public option.”

It is ridiculous to write an editorial opining at length about how horrible it is that, “the current legislation does not include the public option,” when as yet there is no current legislation. There are three competing committee plans in the House and nothing whatever in the Senate. There are a hundred or so legislators shooting off their mouths about what they intend to have in the legislation but, to repeat, there is no legislation.

There is a bunch of chopped up meat on the sausage factory floor. Yuck.