Barack Can Take A Couple Of Days To Lick His Wounds...

...and bask in the limelight of "victory" but he still has to deal with a number of promises and nations who are attacking democratic values.
 
Chris Selley's Full Pundit: Barack Obama's glorious mess

Your move, Canadian health care

We don’t have the American system to kick around any more.
In an excellent column in the Ottawa Citizen, Andrew Cohen notes that however positive and momentous Barack Obama’s health-care reforms turn out to be, their tortured birth will be remembered as a low point in the history of American partisan politics. “In opposing the bill, to a member,” he writes, GOP members “broke faith with the Republicans who joined the Democrats in passing the Social Security Act of 1935, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act and the Social Security Act of 1965.” The days of such alliances, he says, appear to be over. (And as we speak, the GOP website features Nancy Pelosi surrounded by what appears to be hellfire.)
The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente thinks the bill “entrenches two deeply destructive American trends: ideological warfare without end, and the metastatic growth of U.S. debt and entitlement spending.” (Plus, as the Montreal Gazette’s editorialists note, “opinion polls have been moving against the measure” — which doesn’t augur especially well for the rollout of what is, at the end of the day, a hideously complex system.) Wente’s right that Obama’s comparison between health care and social security overlooks the unsustainability of the latter, and that sooner or later Washington is going to “have to pay the piper.” But as just about everyone today is noting, the previous system was horribly unjust — and health-care spending was out of control to begin with. Better Washington address a bigger fiscal crisis that includes universal coverage, it says here, than a smaller one that doesn’t.

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