In what might be the truest piece you’ll read all week, Matt Taibbi registers his utter lack of surprise at the faltering prospects of health care reform:

The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. There is insufficient political will to get it done. It doesn’t matter that it’s an urgent national calamity, that it is plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ over 8 that our system could not possibly be worse and needs to be fixed very soon, and that, moreover, the only people opposing a real reform bill are a pitifully small number of executives in the insurance industry who stand to lose the chance for a fifth summer house if this thing passes.

It won’t get done, because that’s not the way our government works. Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters.

Emphasis added.

So Obama comes in at a time when the country does indeed vote for change, and to the extent we’ve been given anything remotely resembling “change” it’s been incremental, tiny change. Insufficient change. Paltry enough that it both emboldens the right and enrages those on the left or even in the middle who believe that the system, and not just health care, needs to be overhauled.

There will be no overhaul. Not in terms of our policy in the Mideast; not in terms of the way we regulate Wall Street, not in terms of health care. Nothing.

This whole business, it was a litmus test for whether or not we even have a functioning government. Here we had a political majority in congress and a popular president armed with oodles of political capital and backed by the overwhelming sentiment of perhaps 150 million Americans, and this government could not bring itself to offend ten thousand insurance men in order to pass a bill that addresses an urgent emergency. What’s left? Third-party politics?

Well, maybe. Because this is where the left-right paradigm breaks down. Republicans are all about bringing Obama down; fine, that’s politics, but what’s the Republican alternative to any of this?