Under attacks from the right and severe lack of backbone from the left, health care reform is starting to wobble on its feet.    While I remain a steadfast supporter of reform on both moral and economic grounds, the process is in trouble.    Between lies and half-truths being tossed by the Republicans in the face of reform and the Democrats inability to properly deflect them, the ship is taking on too much water and without some change will probably founder.    This should not happen.

I think it can be saved — and I think we can benefit from a good, solid bill that enacts real reform — but the President and his supporters must change course and tactics and must do it soon or however poorly-designed the arguments of the opposition may be the American people, and ultimately the support beneath the bill, will fall away into oblivion.

Get On Message — The White House must get their entire staff back on a single, solid, concise message.    Instead of coming out of the chute with guns blazing, this administration has sauntered into the park holding a bill on a platter and were surprised that they were attacked from the bushes.   Put on the battle gear, grow a pair, give out the orders to everyone on the team, and get marching in lockstep.     The message from the White House must be solid, without holes, and consistent.

Stick to Your Guns — Speaking of a consistent message, the President must come out on national television in front of Congress and say, “This is what we want for health care reform — points A, B, C.   Anything else, I will VETO — period.”    And he must stand behind that decision, no matter what the polls say, no matter how the votes appear to be swinging.    If you’re going to be bold, you have to stick to it or nobody will believe you, and right now, nobody thinks anyone’s really serious except the fear-mongers.

Public Option or Bust — The President’s punch list for reform must include the public option without it being a possible drop point.   It is the only way true reform can happen and everyone knows it.   Quit listening to the detractors and waffling on it. This is not a recipe for doughnuts, it’s health care reform.

The Buck Stops Here — President Obama must come out and state exactly how they are going to pay for reform, whether in the form of savings, taxes, discounts, or other means.    The numbers must be clean, clear, and understandable without an accounting degree.   He must stop skirting around the fact that in order to pay for this, people will have to be taxed.    We citizens are not stupid, and if you tell it how it is, we’re likely to back you, but you cannot hide from what is the truth.    If you’re going to sock it to the rich, then say that.   If you’re going to raise all of our taxes by a margin to cover everyone else, tell us how much.      We want to know the bottom line and then we’re likely to sign the check.

Go to the People — The President must engage the public media like he did during the candidacy and go on any newscast, talk show, and public media that will listen.   He must call a national address and engage all networks.    Taking along the solid, concise message of the first point, he needs to present it to the American people over and over, using graphs or videos or flowcharts or dayglo chimpanzees — whatever visual aids will help everyone understand the benefits and costs of health care reform and how it will affect them.     Almost everyone I know is confused and knows little about what this bill will or won’t do and that must stop. Everyone should be talking about it around the water cooler and we should all know the exact picture, whether or not we agree with it.

Tighten the Screws — Once all this has been done, the White House must then put enormous pressure on its Democratic base in both houses to perform and align with their message.   If that means calling every representative into a conference and having a Come-To-Jesus talk, so be it.    Stop the sound bites of Democrats waffling within their own swimming pool while the Republicans dance outside and point fingers — it’s embarrassing.

Stop Beating the Dead Horse — The entire Democratic party along with the White House must stop talking of “bipartisanship”.     It is worthless.     We all well know that most Republicans do not want to reform health care and therefore will at best water down the reform and at worst kill it, this sort of bill must not be signed with the least bit of dilution.

If Necessary, Go Down Gracefully — If, after all this solidarity, marketing to the public, demands of the Congress, and adherence to a clear principle you cannot get the votes, you can’t get them — simple as that.   This is Landmark Reform™ — it might not happen this round, although we need it desperately.    But the clear and simple way of ensuring that, if it dies, you will not be able to resurrect it for another 10-20 years is to waffle and cajole and weasel and compromise it into a small, weak shadow of its original intent.      Better to lose and lose big than to be decimated into pieces too small to put together again or, worse yet, to implement a bill that ends up being a drooling half-wit representation of Real Change.

We need to have health care reform.    I think most Americans want health care reform, but we all want it to be done correctly, clearly, and decisively.     This can and should truly be a huge turning point in our history as a country.

Although an Obama supporter, I am not one of the “Kool-Aid Clan” that drank the juice and now sees stars coming out of his nether regions wherever he walks.   No, President Obama is a man, a human, and a politician, prone to the same influences that all others are.   It is for this reason that I am disappointed on his stance on several issues, namely warrantless wiretapping, abortion, and the prosecution (or lack thereof) of the acts of torture that the United States has committed in its “war on terror”.

The fact is, we now have on record leaked memos from the Bush administration authorizing extreme measures to be used in extracting information, quotes from Dick Cheney about what sort of tactics were used on detainees, and probably the most damning evidence of all, the International Committee of the Red Cross report citing that the methods used on US prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay and other “black sites” around the world were, in fact, nothing but torture.

The ICRC is the independent, non-political group assigned to police nations for violations of the Geneva Conventions, the set of international treaties that determine world-wide rules for waging war and the treatment of such people as prisoners of war.     Essentially, the GCs were convened to hold all countries to some minimum standards of decorum when in conflict (personally, I think it’s hilarious, because why not just outlaw war?  That is another discussion, however.)

The ICRC report is quite easy to read and accessible, written in plain, understandable English — I’ll even post it here as a link:

ICRC Report on Torture

I urge you to read it, or at least some of it; the summaries are darn good bits, and reading even one of the types of torture used will set your hair on end.  The accounts of the acts done by CIA operatives and other personnel are…not pretty, but something we should all be aware of, because our country endorsed and used these on other living human beings.

These reports are never meant to be seen by the public; as you can read, it was addressed to the CIA and is marked confidential.   Thus the reporters have held nothing back in their evaluation of the true situation and what it means in moral and ethical terms.   It makes no bones about their evaluation of the treatment of the top 14 “high value” detainees, saying, “…the ICRC clearly considers that the allegations of the fourteen include descriptions of treatment and interrogation techniques — singly or in combination — that amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”    This is nothing less than a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions by the United States government.

And I’d like something to be done about it.

So far, Spain is on the ball and has already started working on prosecuting six Bush-administration officials for their involvement in authorizing torture tactics, but why should we wait for other countries to do our dirty work?    You can be assured that Europe has far less to lose if they choose to prosecute the people involved in this than we do, but don’t we, the people, care enough to deal with this ourselves?  Does the new administration not know what has happened and that they have a responsibility to find those guilty and to prosecute them for their crimes?

Of course they do — they’re just avoiding it because it’ll burn up HUGE amounts of political capital, especially with the far Right.     There’s always been a bit of a precedent to avoid such mole-whackings of the previous administration, even to the point of pardoning the whole messy system (hellooooo, Nixon?).    I do not think that we should let this one slide into the past without even a whimper, however.    So far, Attorney General Eric Holder has been rather mute on the issue, dodging the central question of torture prosecutions, despite saying during his confirmation that he did not agree with the tactics and that it should be punished.     And fair enough, he’s just getting started, but…we’re waiting.   And we don’t want to be kept waiting forever.

Change is not always easy.    It oftentimes pisses people off and makes enemies.    Change can be hard, stressful, cumbersome.    You might end up making just as big of a mess from performing change as you started with, or even worse.   But on this note, we cannot let falter — the United States, the American people, are not torturers and we do not stand for that sort of behavior.    We must redeem ourselves in the world’s eyes as well as our own, for how can we face our children and say we did the right thing if we sweep this under the rug?

It will be hard and difficult and painful, but it must be done.    Please, President Obama, prosecute the perpetrators of torture.    And please, American public, support the effort.    We can do better, and we should.   Pay the bill and bring those to bear for their heinous acts — please.