Egg-Sucking Blue Dogs & the ObamaCare Compromise

Back when I was growing up on the farm, I learned that there was a difference between dogs that could hunt, and dogs that would make a lot of noise but were generally lazy.

We didn't own these dogs. We had a fine watchdog that was a cross between Alaskan Husky and Border Collie. He kept the yapping rabble from the woods out of the yard around our house. But the hunting dogs visited us anyway. Often. Their owners would turn them loose of a night, and they would go baying across the countryside in search raccoons and possum.

The hunting dogs produced results for men who were genuinely hunting.

The others, the noisy, lazy ones, were generally the dogs of shiftless, beer-swilling men who claimed to be coon-hunters but in truth were just guys who liked to get away from home to swap ribald stories of loose women, lie about their exploits, and talk sports. Like most people, we didn't really care as long as they didn't leave their empties alongside our property.

But you could tell a difference in the dogs. The good hunting dogs were well fed, usually returned to their masters, and if they did wander by they were well behaved until someone came looking for them.

The dogs of the bull-tossers were often poorly fed, mistreated, and poorly behaved. They would often as not wind up in the henhouse where we would find them stealing eggs. Naturally they were penitent when they were caught, tails tucked between their legs, and they would flee as soon as you told them to "git." However, if you turned your back on them to soon, they would return to the property, and to the hen house.

Some people would shoot these dogs. My folks and I could never bring ourselves to that point, although they made us angry enough. Sometimes we'd load 'em into the pickup where we would drive them over to the property of one of the men we knew were involved with this kind of faux hunting. My dad said that they would get back to the original owners soon enough, because no one wanted to feed extra dogs, especially "the lazy SOBs who don't actually hunt."

I couldn't help but think of the two types of hunting dogs when I heard that the Blue Dog Democrats had reached a "compromise" on the health care reform bill with their fellow Democrats on Henry Waxman's committee.

The baying Blue Dogs have promised us that they are fiscally conservative men hunting for savings on our behalf. Well, according to the word from Waxman's committee, here's what they've accomplished:

First, they "won" a promise that ObamaCare won't be voted on for a few more weeks. They already had that one in the bag. This is a non issue.

Second, they claim that ObamaCare will not have a mandatory government plan but will be optional. That was already in the wording of the bill.

Third, on a bill that easily will cost $1.5 Trillion in its first 10 years, they've got Democrats to agree that a meager Point One Trillion in savings will be made in the cost, leaving us with "only" $1.4 Trillion to worry about. With that small egg from our hen house, these Blue Dogs congratulate themselves on a fine hunting expedition and toss in the white towel.

And they expect us to pet them behind the ears and feed them some more. Oh, yes; they expect our grateful vote in 2010.

Well, pardon the hell out of me, but what did I warn you about? I told you the Blue Dogs would sell us out, that they were merely looking for sufficient political cover so that they could tell us that they worked hard to "protect us" from those evil liberals on Capitol Hill, all the while seeing how many eggs they could suck from our hen house!

Those noisy hounds from my youth were worthless, and not worth shooting. So, too, with these "blue" hounds of the today's political world. You can't count on them to have principles, other than their own self-preservation. If we do not rid ourselves of them in November 2010, they will sneak back into our lives, and destroy our nest eggs, one by one.

A pro-ObamaCare columnist at the online version of the Kansas City Star noted that the Blue Dogs essentially gave President Obama a victory. You can read his valedictory here.

If the Pro-ObamaCare people know the truth, what is your excuse?