So the other day I had a conversation with a friend about the current ACA mess. Convinced I was being brilliantly witty, I’d posted something about ‘when is someone going to get fired for this mess?’. In a nutshell, what this friend had said/asked was – what was the point of firing someone now? What is it going to accomplish? Now, this friend is ridiculously smart. I, on the other hand, am never going to be a Jeopardy contestant with the box of rocks I’ve got in my head. At the time I think the only answer I could come up with was something about carburetors and weather balloons.
Given some time to think about it I still believe people need to be handed their walking papers over this. Why? Because these Dilbert-like, pointy haired management types with their frightening incompetence are still “managing” this mess. Why in the world would we let the people who were not competent enough to get it done in the first place keep touching it?
Lets say a new restaurant opens up. Day one a bunch of customers get sick. Day two a bunch more customers get sick. The health department steps in and discovers one of the cooks is pissing in the soup. The owner says “nobody told me the soup was mostly urine. I would never have opened had I known this”. The chef says “if you want to blame someone, blame me. What’s important now is that we work on eliminating the urine, not playing the blame game”. The sous chef says “yes, we knew there was a possibility of urine in the soup but I was following orders to open on time”. Meanwhile the cook with the overactive bladder may or may not still be flavoring the soup. Jay Carney says this is all because the cook isn’t making a living wage. Hannity does a three-hour special on liberal bias in the health department. Jesse Jackson says management is blaming the cook because he’s black (he’s actually from Ecuador). Wait, I lost my train of thought…
The point is that there’s a pointy-haired management layer in there somewhere that is probably left over from the pre-Blackberry era that needs to go. Forget politics, why would you want them still there mucking this thing up? I wholeheartedly agree with the premise of the ACA. Unfortunately how it came to be and its implementation is so piss-poor it’s hard to fathom. It’s why those of us with a more libertarian lean have such a distrust of government. Generally speaking, the government can manage to screw up putting round pegs in round holes – and then spin it such that the other party gave them nothing but square holes therefore we need to rebuild all the pegs to be square.
Oh and the apology? I was going to say something about the democrats needing to figure out how to spin/apologize to protect the next several rounds of elections… but then I remembered this was the republican party we’re talking about. Right now they’re somewhat quiet. I suspect that they’re mostly dumbfounded and speechless that such a gift has been given to them. Never fear though – they’ll manage to screw it up shortly. They’ll go off on some social issue tangent that will piss off the exact voting blocks they’ll need next time.
The moral of the story? I’m not sure. Community organizing and campaigning are not the same thing as leadership? The republican party need to fire their marketing and communication people? We all need more Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber in our lives? All I know is don’t order the soup at a new restaurant.
troutdog 
You waited a long time to blog again and we (the idiots in the rest of America that voted for incompetents – hint, everybody) don’t see a real answer here. Is it, “fire the bastards” and then replace them with a new set of bastards? Is it “fire only the incompetent bastards” which will make rock/scissors/paper the deciding factor since it is really difficult to discern simple bastards from incompetent bastards (though we could look to Canada lately and find a deciding factor). I do understand your reluctance to consider any government employee capable of making a well thought out, logical, inclusive decision, but what else do we have? That constitution does stipulate as well as eliminate power in the hands of one person, but then that puts it square back in the laps (mighty close to their crotches) of Congress. Zounds.
Fire ’em all and then outsource it to Amazon and Google! If we’re going to spend a gazillion dollars on something, might as well have it increase the share price of something in my 401k.