Let’s assume that the group of people who planned and executed the September 2001 attack on America’s institutions of finance, the military and an unknown third target (I would have thought the CIA in Langley, Virginia) were something more capable than idiots. Let us assume they had at least a notion of a plan that went beyond hitting us where it hurts.

The American response to such an attack was not difficult to predict: We would identify a likely enemy and strike with the awesome might of the world’s most powerful military.

Our response may have gone beyond what the enemy predicted. If they had knowledge of the then residents of the halls of power, they could have predicted a war in Iraq. Though unrelated to the attack and the attackers, Iraq was a war the White House wanted for reasons as obvious as a solar eclipse.

“We have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms. But I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership. I am here to launch a new chapter of engagement that will be sustained throughout my administration." - Barrack Obama, Summit of the Americas, April 2009.

The United States Civil War – a war that cost over 600,000 lives – was a blessing to the indigenous tribes of the North American continent. While the white people were killing each other over the right to keep black people enslaved the natives west of the Mississippi enjoyed a period of relative peace. When the war ended however the American nation turned its attention west and employed its new war machine, soldiers and weaponry, to the grand design of manifest destiny, a destiny that necessarily included the eradication of the indigenous tribes.

In what Thomas Paine christened The Age of Reason, democracy supplanted the royal monarchy as the government of choice for enlightened nations. There was much discussion in those pivotal times of human advancement concerning the inherent Rights of Man. Borrowing from England’s Magna Carta, the British philosopher John Locke and the French philosophers Jean-Jacque Rousseau and Francois-Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire), Thomas Jefferson immortalized the universal human rights in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

As the world turns away from the American century, leaving behind the antiquated and self-defeating war on drugs, a war that the late William Burroughs rightly derided as an excuse to create an international police apparatus, leaving behind the global economic scheme that impoverishes nations while enriching corporations, leaving behind the Cold War, the imperialist wars and the wars on terror, America is stuck in reverse, desperately clinging to what used to be, desperately holding to its lost glory, desperately hoping for that last second reprieve that never comes.

The world is changing, moving forward in leaps and bounds, and far from leading America is an anchor, a backwards force fighting against the tide, vainly trying to rewrite the course of history like telling a river where it can and cannot run.

“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” - John F. Kennedy

"The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of bold projects and new ideas. Rather, it will belong to those who can blend passion, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the great enterprises and ideals of American society."- Robert F. Kennedy

"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die." - Edward M. Kennedy

It appears that those of us who desire real and systemic healthcare reform may have lost the battle in the public forum and the ironies are as rich as the profits of the healthcare industry are obscene.

How do you argue with people who begin the debate with the premise that the government wants to kill old people and proceed to an impassioned denunciation of Socialism under Hitler’s Third Reich? (For those who are confused, Hitler was a tyrant and a dictator whose political party captured power in part by trapping the German socialist party into a deal with the devil. If Hitler was a Socialist then Reagan was an Anarchist.)

You can’t argue with these people and that’s the point. The outrage is real but it tragically misplaced. The world is turned upside down and inside out. These are the people who stand the most to gain from meaningful healthcare reform and the most to lose from its failure.