Who IS McNasty?

John McCain has enlisted The Decider's Rovian operatives to run his campaign.... the very ones who slimed McCain and his family in the 2000 GOP primaries. The very ones who Swiftboated another war hero, John Kerry, in the 2004 campaign. Now in McCain's name, these very same operatives savagely and deceptively attack Barack Obama's character in this one.

George W. Bush's toxic influence has finally managed to destroy not just the economy and our moral standing in the world.... it has now infected the tone and substance of McCain's 2008 campaign.

McCain has repeatedly retooled his message and campaign staff in his effort to corner his fatal-obsession need to be president and commander-in-chief. But, as Fred Hiatt suggests today in "What McCain Hasn't Tried".... (WaPo) "imagine if McCain had selected for his running mate not a partisan attack dog but someone with deep knowledge of the economy and a record of reaching across the aisle.

Imagine if McCain had taken the campaign high-road. "Imagine if McCain himself had decided to respond to this crisis as an American first, a candidate second." But the reality is far different. As McCain was speaking at a campaign rally in Minnesota, after having to correct a supporter's assertion that Obama is an "Arab," McCain's "campaign ads were calling Obama a liar."

Even William Kristol in his op-ed today pleads with McCain, "Fire the Campaign." (NYTimes) He counsels that McCain "has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed."

Kristol, an early diehard McCain supporter, continues, "What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time."

All of McCain's frantic low-road tactics and Kristol's suggested "junk the whole thing" Hail-Marying raise worrying questions. If McCain can't run a successful presidential campaign, how can he run a country in financial peril bordering on insolvency, embroiled in two wars with rising unemployment and international relationships on the ropes?

And most worrying.... if McCain can dump his moral code and morph into Bush to further his political ambitions, just who is John McCain?

November 4.

Take an Aspirin and Call a CEO

Welcome to George W. Bush's world of privatized, corporatized medicine.

A world where the premier protector of the health of our citizens, the Surgeon General, is muzzled and constrained by the administration's political agenda.

A world where insurers, not physicians, rule on the type and level of care.... or even if one receives care.

The question posed today in the Washington Post.... "Who Killed U.S. Medicine?" .... reveals how increasingly under Bush's corporate-favoring agenda our physicians are under siege, both professionally and financially.

It's medicine for profit not care.

"Doctor's work is dictated by the policies of insurers and governments, and independent physicians have been replaced by salaried doctors who are accountable to the hospitals or insurers that employ them."

And, government oversight entities, like state insurance commissions who used to work to protect the insured.... today work to enforce insurers ever-constricting coverage guidelines as their budgets are slashed and their mandates weakened for political expediency.

A headline in today's Des Moines Register reports such an outrage.... "Iowan vs. insurance company: Another lost fight for payment." It tells the all-too-frequent story of an insurance company.... this time it's Transamerica Life Insurance and their long-term-care policy.... refusing to pay on a technicality.

In this case, the policyholder Alzheimer's patient was being looked after in the locked memory-care unit of an assisted-living facility and receiving specialized care. Transamerica said it wasn't a "nursing home" and refused payment. The Iowa Insurance Division upheld the insurance company on this matter of semantics.

Shameful. It wasn't that long ago that the mere mention of the insurance commissioner brought such loop-hole-abusing insurers into line. No more.

But, the single-payer system so widely lauded by many politicians isn't the answer either. Under this type of government-run system, the physicians incentive is stifled by imposed salaries, and the inevitable result is a lowered standard of care.

"German physicians unhappy with their salaries and work hours under this kind of a system had no recourse against their monopolistic bosses but to go on strike last year." Not a healthy situation for doctors nor those under their care.

The AMA, who should be the entity battling for the physicians, has recently too often engaged in "trivial warfare" while physicians are "increasingly forced to becomes salaried employees.... and constrained by recipes for the practice of medicine that are cooked up by government and insurance company bureaucrats."

The answer to this sorry state of affairs.... our political leaders must have the courage to legislatively step on the neck of insurers and hospitals, and put teeth into enforcement so physicians can practice their profession.

Government oversight agencies must once again be directed to protect the public, and the AMA must refocus their efforts to advocate reversal of the corporatization of our physicians and medical care.

Perhaps then, we can stop our health-care system's slide toward imminent collapse.