P.M. Carpenter

The symbolic contrast could not have been more telling. Although he designated this week's withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraqi cities as an "important milestone," President Obama nevertheless piggybacked -- with "little fanfare," as the New York Times observed -- on another White House ceremony to make the announcement.

The semi-distinguished occasion was what you might call a necessary farce -- an exiting proverbial whimper, not a bang; a toe-tagging of peremptory imperial stupidity; a body-outline-chalking of six years of inclusive, colossal waste.

As our little shop of health-care horrors continues spinning its complex web of uncovered gaps, omissions, pitfalls, holes and exceptions even for the insured -- this morning, for instance, the NY Times' lead story, "Many With Insurance Still Bankrupted," notes that "three-quarters of people who are pushed into personal bankruptcy by medical problems actually had insurance," which a former Cigna executive labeled, before a Senate health committee last week, as "fake insurance," marketed to "confuse[d] customers" -- we now face, owing to a grotesquely unresponsive Democratic Congress, the profound paradox of a right-wing backlash.

Maybe you work in sales, and you'd like to learn how to gracefully deny your product's undeniable deficiencies; or perhaps you're about to testify in court, under oath, and you're not sure how to tell the truth without telling the uncomfortable truth; or it could be that you're conducting a Sanfordlike affair, although probably a trifle closer to home, and you wish to reserve the futuristic option of saying you never really, actually, absolutely lied about it ...

Whatever the case may be, whatever your furtive need, I give you, from Sunday's "Meet the Press," with guest David Axelrod, the Platonic Ideal of rhetorical evasion, from which you can surely profit in your personal life.

Some in the mainstream press are finally taking proper and above-the-fold notice of the intensifying rift, in the primal grounds-for-divorce matter of overdue health-care reform, between organized liberalism and the disheveled Democratic Senate, even though, in its emphasis on a handful of liberal groups, the press improperly ignores the growing separation between Middle America and its elected representatives.

Nevertheless, what's there is a start, such as the Washington Post's story yesterday with the somewhat inverted headline, "Health-Care Activists Targeting Democrats: Sniping Among Liberals May Jeopardize Votes Needed to Pass Bill." As the story unfolds, we learn that it's liberals targeting backsliding Democrats, and, inferentially speaking, special-interest health-care activists of non-liberal stripes who are actually jeopardizing votes for a bill worth passing.

It's 4 a.m., and I'm sitting here at the keyboard gazing at a blank Word document while coughing so violently -- the result of a really nasty, untreated chest infection -- my first thought was that, before the morning is over, my lungs might be the only thing to go on this page.

But hey, there's one paragraph down. That's a start. And I very much wanted to mull this "cooperative insurance pool" business, versus the vastly more intelligent "public option," that Senate conservatives have concocted. Perhaps if I seize creativity by the throat -- you know, shamelessly lift and steal -- there can be a finish.

So here goes.

I have just two hopeful words for those out-of-power, anxiety-ridden Republicans who see the election year of 2010 as but another troublesome vision: health care.

Congressional Democrats, particularly those in the upper and, here's a rapidly fading cliche, more deliberative chamber, are hanging themselves on the issue, and if they don't complete their suicidal job then voters will be justified in doing it for them.

I have searched for even the slimmest thread of journalistic redemption in yesterday's elaborately cuddly New York Times profile of the "soft-spoken but tenacious" Max Baucus, who, "as [he] pursues his goal" of health-care reform in America, knows "one challenge is his own reputation." But I'll be damned if I can find one.

Not only are we treated to press-office, stenographically heroic puff such as that above, there are direct quotes of personal nobility to boot: "I think I'm the luckiest guy in the world," mused Baucus (who, we also learn to our great astonishment, "loves everything Montana"), for "I am at the point to be able to do something really significant, really meaningful, and it must be done."

Gritty, plucky, and determined. That's Max for you, the messianic reformer ridin' in from the wild and unruly West, with a Tony Curtis glint in his eye and sparkle to his teeth: Yes, the Times gives you Montana's Sen. Max Baucus, who "said he had been preparing for this role since he was elected to the Senate in 1978, and viewed this as his moment ... to make history."

Although the questions did range topically in yesterday's press conference, they mostly boiled down to a presidential testosterone test on Iran and the U.S. Congress.

Would Obama, as nostalgic neocons have urged, further estrange a corrupt, medieval and intractable regime; and would he also, as the wistfully under- and uninsured have urged, further estrange a corrupt, medieval and intractable regime?

And the answers to both, as best I could fathom, were, Well, sort of, but absolutely no one knows what in hell is going on, so stay tuned, although corruption, medievalism and intractability do appear to have the upper and universal hand.

The unequivocal and hardly unique wording of a NY Daily News headline -- "President Obama's health-care reforms shaky with Democrats, GOP" -- happened to catch my attention yesterday, because with creeping (and rather creepy) frequency the still-minority contents of my inbox announce, with considerable outrage and absolute certainty, the precise opposite: that whatever problems exist within the diminishing prospects of comprehensive reform, they are, at root, a top-down problem. The toppest-down, so to speak.

Obama, these forwarded screeds and accompanying emails proclaim, has sold us out, simple as that. But worse, as noted, is that there seems to be some uptick in this unsourced sentiment. It still lies on the fringe, as best I can tell, but one never knows; some deliriums, like the 9/11 truth movement, possess an infectious virulence.

GOP agitprop squads hit the streets and took to the airwaves yesterday with some of the finest dither, highest indignation and purest neocon drivel we've heard since October, 2002.

"The president of the United States is supposed to lead the free world, not follow it," fumed Lindsey Graham on ABC's "This Week" about President Obama's measured response to all things revolutionary in Iran, just as former presidential candidate Fred Thompson, on "Meet the Press," charged the White House with "fecklessness" and by comparison praised Old Europe -- yes, it's conveniently back -- for its resonant courage.