In retrospect, we should have expected that Democrats would wait until this time of year to buckle and cave in on public health care. They were probably figuring that once the Massachusetts ground had frozen up, no one could hear Ted Kennedy turning in his grave as the party that purported to lionize him and his family, once again, turned their backs on the social reforms that defined the Democratic party in the middle of the 20th century.

Were I in a more humourous mood, this would be the part of this entry where I would start a sentence with the phrase, "Now, I’m not the kind of person to say ‘I told you so,’ but …" I’m not in the mood to lay on the yuks right now, though, and one of the primary rules of comedy is never to beat a joke into the ground. Democrats retracting from their election promises of progressive reform and instead caving in to big business and big money has become as predictable as the sun rising in the east every day. As inelegantly as Ralph Nader phrased it after the 2008 election — and I still think he owes Obama, and the nation, an apology for the words he used — the spirit of his observation has proven true. Obama has become yet another proxy for corporations, and allowed his party to once again kowtow to the power of the almighty dollar, sacrificing the needs of the people in the hope of getting enough money and corporate support to maintaing Democratic power in Washington.

The Democratic party has lost all claims it might have had to calling itself the party of FDR and Kennedy and LBJ. If Democrats had been as obsessed with maintaining power sixty years ago as they are now, you would still see the word "colored" above half the drinking fountains in the South today. I can understand the marriage of the Republican party with big business, and as despicable as Karl Rove’s Machiavellian politics were, at least when he got his vaunted "fifty percent plus one," his Republican president and congress passed law after law after law, squashing civil liberties, helping the rich get richer, and screwing the poor and working classes into the ground. The Democrats have larger majorities in both houses of Congress than Dubya ever had, and a president who campaigned saying that he believed in single-payer health care. When it came time to actually reform health care, though, single-payer was not only taken off of the table, but Democrats wouldn’t even allow single-payer advocates in on any discussions and debates. The public health care option, and everything spawned from it like the "Medicare buy-in," have slowly withered away, and what we are left with is a huge giveaway to the insurance industry that Republicans are still fighting tooth and nail because of their obsession with destroying Obama by any means necessary.

I have said this before, but as the health care debacle draws to its sordid conclusion, I don’t think I can point to a more demonstrative example of my point: It is time for all true progressives and liberals to tell the Democratic party to go compromise itself, and join the Green Party. If people like Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and Joe Lieberman are the true power brokers in the Democratic party, no well-intending progressive, from the everyday voter all the way up to the Dennis Kuciniches of the country, should continue to lend their name, power, and most importantly, vote, to a party that has repeatedly demonstrated that it will not take progressive concerns seriously. Just as the Tea Party lunacy has shown the divides in this country’s right wing, the health care debate has shown that the liberals in the Democratic party are not in the right party. The days of Republicans and Democrats taking everyone’s votes for granted because of where they stand on abortion or global warming or X issue have to stop, and they have to stop now. Both parties are sending this country into the bottom of a fetid cesspool, and the only difference is how quickly each party wants to take us there.