SHORTER DANIEL HENNINGER: If you say bad things about the President, or even listen to them, the boogie man will come and blow you up with a nuclear bomb.

BELLS AND WHISTLES. Over at OpinionJournal a Daniel Henninger column runs under the Jacobin headline "Patient Rage: Consumers march to the walls of the health-care castle." The input considered, however, is not from consumers, but from politicians, providers and their middlemen, the corporate human resources administrators who try to limit the effect of rising health-care costs to employees under their jurisidictions.

Henninger notes that most citizens get their health care coverage from the company store, so this area is where the "real action is," leaving concerns of the uninsured (14.6 percent of Americans, per the last census, and steadily rising) and Medicare recipients to one side. This ellision would seem to guarantee a less depressing picture of national health care right off the bat, but as it turns out, even these beneficiaries are not immune to rising costs, as any covered employee who saw his premiums and deductibles increase in the past year will suspect. Employers are trying all kinds of tricks to hide the damage -- for example, many of them are slashing benefits to retirees, which is a neat way to hide cost-cutting from those workers still at their desks -- but even Henninger cannot deny that companies "are taking employee premiums higher for more or less flat coverage."


And so a conference was convened by the World Health Congress; Henninger was its keynote moderator, and most of his article is based on testimony to that Congress.

The good news, such as it is, relies largely on the standbys of any modern and failing system promising that things will get better soon: technology ("brighter explosions are also in health's firmament... remote medical sensors, implanted monitors, Web-based health-care 'wizards'") and innovation. These benefits include "Web-based programs and human 'coaches' who give guidance on dealing with chronic aliments or complex medical problems," "a consumer-directed plan with a year-to-year financial rollover for its own workers, 'many of them single mothers,'" and "put[ting] a greater decision burden on workers."

All this makes Henninger optimistic. But haven't we attended this sort of presentation before? The Federal Government was going to be "reinvented," the internet was going to shift the very paradigm of business, and privatization was -- is! -- going to restore Social Security. Yet at the end of the day we get a lot of geegaws, new processes and metrics, and decreased services. The shrinking of the Federal deficit (remember that?) was largely paid for, and bought into, by reducing expectation of services from the Government. Given the way things are going, I doubt the reformation of health care will work any differently.

Time was when the powers that be distracted us punters with bread and circuses. Now we get bells and whistles. But if your kid needs her tonsils out, I don't see how they're going to make things any easy. Perhaps, given the glorious promise of "remote medical sensors" and such like, I'm being insufficiently forward-looking. But many of us can only look forward to the next (or present) medical exigency, and wonder how we're going to pay for it.

CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG -- ON MY TERMS? Daniel Henninger weeps that "our politics has never seemed more polarized." In his investigation of this sad phenomenon, he does not mention Rush Limbaugh, NewsMax, FreeRepublic, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, or the yobs yelling "Shut it down" and "Get out of Cheney's house" in 2000. He does mention the ACLU, Roe v. Wade, and the bad people who made fun of religious maniac Jerry Boykin.

The "Mean Democrats" meme -- catch it!

MORE YANKEE HATRED! Enough of Daniel Henninger's manichaeism -- back to my own! I was looking around for some Yankee-hating stuff to sooth my wounded sense of justice. This is pretty good ("I can't stand those assholes with their shitty stadium and announcer who can't pronounce jack shit, and that's when he actually remembers to. I'm sick of Robert Merrill over-enunciating the national anthem..." Maybe he should revise that last bit to make it about that Irish tenor guy who seems to be there every goddamn night).

But my greatest find is the lyrics page of Christpuncher, who are apparently the new Meatmen. Their anti-Yankees song is pretty cool:

Let's go Bosox
let's go Mets
anyone else
who's fuckin' left
someone else
please take away the crown
and put the Yankees
six feet underground

Now who, as David Huddleston says in Blazing Saddles, can argue with that? But if you're an afficionado of this sort of thing, Christpuncher's other songs are even more amazing -- and if the titles alone ("Fuck You, Jesus," "Beating Off a Clown") don't convince you, maybe this quatrain from "Empty My Colostomy Bag" will:

My bag is filling up
to the very top
please don't yell at me
I cannot make it stop

I should add that, though geniuses, these lads have socially backwards views ("Osama's a Fag") that I cannot endorse. You know, like H.L. Mencken and Jim Lileks.

JESUS FREAK. It starts out as one of those the-religious-right-is-not-so-scary thumbsuckers, but Daniel Henninger's latest quickly veers off into Cotton Mather territory, with a sweeping separation of the elect from the unelect that, you will not be surprised to learn, favors the Republican Party.

"In the 1992 election," Goodman Heninger informs us, "Bill Clinton got 75% of the secularist vote." Hang on, now -- what's the secularist vote? According to Henninger's social scientist sources, Bolce and De Maio, "Democratic secularists are defined as agnostics, atheists or people who rarely attend church, if ever."

I'm confused by that last bit -- given the habits of the Bible-beaters Henninger is using as a baseline, "rarely attend" might mean they only go on Sundays.

Not confusing at all, though, is the strategy Henninger employs here: we're not the freaks -- you're the freaks! Henninger is aware of the Religious Right's poor
image in the eyes of us heathen degenerates -- "the Bible-whacking, shotgun-rack stereotype," he calls it (as if a large part of what scares some of us about these guys were their living accomodations). But they're not like that at all, he says: for example, the first ones he'd met were "educated, 30-something, Texas suburbanites who worked in the technology sector and worried about running their kids' sports leagues."

And wanted to outlaw homosexuality, declare America a Christian nation, and turn over the educational system to preachers, one might add, though Henninger does not. He attempts to shift the onus of singularity to the godless Dems. Did you know that "60% of first-time white delegates at the [1992] Democratic convention in New York City either claimed no attachment to religion or displayed the minimal attachment..."? Did you find this statistic as tormented ("white," "first-time") as I did? Never mind, the message is clear -- Democrats ain't right with Jesus!

And, as inevitably happens when God is whispering in a columnist's ear, Henninger starts naming names:

In terms of their size and party loyalty," Messrs. Bolce and De Maio argue, "secularists today are as important to the Democratic party as another key constituency, organized labor." In turn this single self-definition tracks political belief across the entire battlefield of the culture wars--abortion, sexuality, prayer in the schools, judicial nominations. Interesting as that is, what intrigues me more as simple politics is how a Howard Dean, John Kerry or Joe Lieberman can feed these creedal beliefs of the "un-religious left" without in time coming themselves to be known as leaders of the party of non-belief? Or hypocrites. It's a hard river to cross.

The linchpin of this outrageous passage is "self-definition" -- I don't know many folks who step up, shake your hand and declare, "Howdy, I'm a secularist!" and I doubt the folks in Bolce's and De Maio's study would, either. But, as slander and tendentiousness go, the rest ain't bad, either, with Henninger in effect telling some Democratic front-runners (including one known for his religiosity) that they should either declare themselves "leaders of the party of unbelief" or be exposed as hypocrites.

One wonders how they would be thus exposed. Mayhap Henninger will assemble a posse of educated, 30-something, Texas suburbanites who work in the technology sector, and loiter outside Joe Lieberman's temple, chanting stuff like "Take off that yarmulke, you!/You ain't a real live Jew!"

THEY LOOKED SO ORDERLY IN THE PUBLICITY SHOTS. Seems like only yesterday that happy Iraqis were smiling for the cameras and waving their brand-new American flags. Back then, OpinionJournal's Daniel Henninger overtly compared the post-Saddam citizens to the liberated East Berliners of 1989.

Funny, I don't recall the conservatives calling for a wave of American soldiers to restore order among newly-freed East Germans. Yet today OpinionJournal says that, in Iraq, "something close to chaos reigns. The lack of security is disrupting the most basic aspects of postwar reconstruction... Rampant lawlessness is the No. 1 complaint of ordinary Iraqis, who are grateful for the new U.S. crackdown on crime."

I love that last sentence. We are so grateful, Mr. Democracy Whiskey Sexy Bush People, for our rampantly lawless crackdown!

"We're not -- repeat, not -- longing for a return to 19th-century colonialism," pledges OJ. (Yeah, and I'm not, repeat not, longing for a thick steak and a good bottle of Chateau Haut-Brion, but put them in front of me and watch them disappear.) OJ reenforces its un-longing for 19th-century colonialism by referring casually to Iraqi administrator L. Paul Bremer as "Lord Bremer" and comparing him to Kitchener.

OJ's editorials have taken on a weird, muzzy, almost drunken feeling since it stopped mattering at all whether what they said made sense or not (approximately late March, I think it was). Check out also the aforementioned Henninger as he writes, joshingly, about how "dull" the economy is -- not "dull" as in listless, which was what I at first thought he meant, but dull as in no fun to talk about.

Well, given how that economy is going, and his own comrades' part in making it so, I shouldn't wonder he would find such conversations tiresome. Henninger's own piece is far from dull, though -- in fact, it proceeds with depraved indifference to human life on a rollicking trip through the economic catastrophes of our age -- such as the dot-com bubble, dismissed here with a hearty "so what if much of it failed?" He then pretends that Olympia Snowe is holding up the economic recovery by being a "downer." No, I'm not kidding. Go see for yourself.

Recently we were all talking about the end of this and that -- History, Ideology, whatever. Reason appears to have taken its place at the egress. The rest of us are next.