Obama: Like a doctor with an unwilling patient

In the days leading up to the election of 2008, I was prepared to get on a plane to England where I would stay with an old friend until my husband could get the dog and cat prepped for emigration (a six-month UK program through which the UK quarantine can be legally avoided) and join me. Had the successor-in-interest to George W. Bush won that election, supported (if one cares to use that word) by his brainless Barbie doll running mate, it would have been impossible for anyone with a working brain and operational human emotions to live in this nation any longer. George W. Bush had done so much damage in so many arenas that it was hard to conceive how a successor cut from the same political cloth could help but make the disaster even worse. I was not willing to live in such a hapless, hopeless, helpless nation, a nation literally sick unto death.

I compulsively read Nate Silver's website, 538, looking for hope, and found it.

I was joyous on election night. It was such an important election night that I begged off meeting friends at a Democratic bar and grill to watch and celebrate; I wanted to savor our salvation at home with my husband, dog and cat, and know I would not now have to flee for my intellectual and emotional life, at the very least.

Since then, of course, the Republicans who managed to get elected or stay elected have been running their mouths and not much else, except the odd smear campaign in this year’s elections. The Republican dumbkopfs of the airwaves are still shaking their fists and turning red, something sufficient to convince the lower two-thirds of the electorate that Mr. Obama is somehow culpable for their economic distress. How can anyone forget Mr. Bush? How will we ever be able to forget Mr. Bush?

Mr. Bush is politically and economically leprous, and he has infected the entire nation with a malady that takes a while to appear, like leprosy, but when it does…..Oh, boy. Lepers, lacking feeling because the nerve ends have been ravaged by disease, lose fingers, toes, ears and noses without ever noticing it is happening, until repair is too late. It is no wonder Lincoln Mitchell wrote in the Huffington Post today:

“Problems only seem more complicated when they are examined more closely and the ability of the president to do much about them, particularly in the post-Bush period, is less than it seems.”

Mr. Obama is like a doctor trying to treat leprosy when the disease is still partly undiscovered, only a few of the abundant lesions having yet appeared. Worse, while he is trying to treat the infection delivered by Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Gonzales, Ms. Rice and a cadre of wet nurses to a nation’s disaster, the patient is being uncooperative. Even Democrats have whined that Mr. Obama is not fast enough. They forget that he has a systemic illness to cure, one that was lovingly nurtured by the above-named disease vectors for eight years; Mr. Obama hasn’t even yet located all the sites of infection yet. Not a day goes by that yet another soul-deadening, nation-destroying program of the Bush years isn’t uncovered. And even when Mr. Obama does find and alleviate some aging sores (please see yesterday’s column), people complain.

At the end of the day, one must know this: curing a systemic disease takes time, even when all the sites of infection are known and the cure is proven and readily available, none of which is the case with the sick nation that is, post-Bush, America. Curing that disease when the patient is intent on derailing one’s efforts might be next to impossible.

But I’ll take what we’ve got at the moment, a president with a brain and working emotions attempting to bring us back to the normalcy Mitchell sees already but for which I am merely hopeful.

Meanwhile, those who voted for Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey need not be proud of themselves this morning. In their ignorant efforts to “cure” their financial woes faster than any human possibly could―even FDR―they have given the infection new sites from which to attack the body politic and the moribund patient, the United States of America.

Pray only that by the mid-term congressional contests the patient will have regained sufficient health that no such infections are elected or re-elected to serve where it counts, in Washington, DC.

GOP Party of Greed tries to delay relief for unemployed millions

This is the third time, at least, the Senate was ready to pass an extension of the Unemployment Insurance benefits. And it is the third time Republicans are trying to stop it passing in a timely manner, considering 185,000 unemployed people have already lost their means to feed, clothe and shelter themselves and their families. By the way, I use those three terms advisedly. Calling this government program benefits puts distance, desirable to those unwilling to grapple with the problem (Republicans), between the human misery delay is causing and their own greedy, self-centered posturing and bargaining.

Today’s gem from the Party of Greed was almost laughable, if its consequences were not so sad. “The objection came, Manley said, because Republicans were trying to introduce unrelated amendments attacking ACORN and the financial-industry bailout, among other things,” according to a HuffPo article. Manley is Jim Manley, senior communications advisor to Sen. Harry Reid, majority leader.

It is not unusual for either party to attach completely unrelated legislation to bills about to be passed. It’s despicable, for either party, but not unusual. In this case, despicable is not even close to the proper description. The Party of Greed loathes ACORN, and I will admit that ACORN has had some bobbles in its mission to serve the disenfranchised…but then, what organization is without its failures? It would seem ACORN is no worse and no better than many. What it has to do with unemployment insurance, however, is clear. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. But it became useful to the Party of Greed in its attempt to increase the human misery that was fertilized and gestated and given birth by their own very odd couple, Dubya and Dickie.

Which brings us to point two, attaching anything about the financial-industry bailout to this bill. But then, the Party of Greed would have no problem adding insult to injury. The facts:

• Dubya came into office with a surplus Clinton left.
• Dubya saved his rich buddies from paying any tax at all, and he gave away several farms to buddies in oil, armaments and godknowswhatallwhichisn’tevenknownyet.
• Dubya and his partner, Deadeye Dick, created the conditions for a financial bailout to be necessary.
• Dubya took the first shot, locking the next administration into a spiraling black hole of unholy financial hell that I frankly doubt we will see our way out of until some sort of apocalypse radically alters the political scenery―a true people’s revolt (and one would hope it would be civil disobedience only, but then, Americans haven’t been starved and thrown out of their homes like so many medieval peasants before, either, not even in the Great Depression. (At which point, a “thank goodness for Franklin Delano Roosevelt” is in order. But for him, we would probably be entering a second dark age. Well, at least the peasants would, providing we had come through the first.)

Sickbutrin

Recently, a columnist on Huffington Post investigated the reasons the Wall Street Journal was inimical to the proposed integrative health care programs for improving health care delivery in the United States and including more people. Drs. Andrew Weill and Deepak Chopra are avid supporters, and they are both well-respected physicians nationally. The author concluded it was because Big Pharm would lose revenues; they make nothing if a patient is told to use some cheap witch hazel on an insect bite rather than buying an expensive cortisone cream.

In that vein, I offer a column I wrote in 2006 in dismay over a then-current TV advertisement that would have had me howling with laughter had it not been so frightening.

Here then, I offer you

SICKBUTRIN

Like a lot of other Americans who don’t believe God is spelled D-o-c-t-o-r, I’m a little tired of seeing TV ads for prescription medications one can ask one’s doctor about taking. But this week, the ads for Wellbutrin ^tm pushed me over the edge; I am now in full-tilt revolt against the pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Here’s the gist of the TV spot: Take Wellbutrin ^tm for depression because there’s a low incidence of sexual side effects. If you take it, you may, however, experience one or more of these side effects:

• Seizure
• …….

OK. Stop right there. Why would anyone want to risk a seizure to get over a little bout of feeling blue, or even a large bout of feeling blue? I mean, crying in public beats the pants off falling down on the floor unconscious, getting carted off to the emergency room at some outrageous cost, and having one’s driving privilege revoked. Because in many states, if you show up at a hospital and get diagnosed with a seizure, you don’t have to worry about informing the Dept. of Motor Vehicles about it; the hospital will. You can then forget about getting behind the wheel until six months have passed without another incident. By then, of course, you will either have lost your job (talk about depressing!) because you can’t get there, or annoyed friends and family with constant requests for rides here, there and everywhere until you don’t have many of those either (talk about depressing!), or maybe you’ve just killed yourself because you couldn’t deal with the depression the side effects of this feel-good capsule produced.

Well, you might think, but how many folks would suffer that side effect? Don’t know. The Web site I viewed didn’t have those numbers and, frankly, I didn’t feel like hunting for them. The fact that that side effect is the one now mentioned FIRST in their TV spot said it all for me.

But wait, there’s more. In case the thought of a seizure doesn’t put you off, maybe one of these unpleasant possibilities will:

• Dry mouth
• Headache
• Increased sweating (fat girls beware!)
• Nausea/vomiting (how quaint)
• Constipation (I didn’t say a word)
• Anxiety
• Fatigue
• Blurred vision (another one that’s really fine for driving skills)

But wait, there’s more. The Web site also advises reporting promptly:

• Unusual weight loss or gain
• Palpitations
• Agitation
• Trouble sleeping

But wait, there’s more. These are labeled “Unlikely, but report promptly:”

• Tremor
• Dizziness
• Fainting
• Mood changes
• Slowed movements
• Difficulty urinating
• Decreased sex drive (AHA!)
• Drowsiness

And then there is the “Very unlikely” category, which includes:

• Seizures
• Mental problems
• Fever
• Muscle aches
• Yellowing of the eyes or skin

Reading on a bit in the disclaimer on the Web site www.Wellbutrinsite.com, one might get the idea that this drug is for people on heavy-duty mood altering medication. It says: “Suddenly stopping certain tranquilizers (e.g., diazepam, chlordiazepoxide) is not recommended because doing so may increase the risk of having seizures.”

Yipes. So maybe it’s fine, then, about all those other side effects. But hey, if a patient is already juiced out of their gourd on deadly chemicals in tiny doses packed in pastel pills, why would that person be worrying about the incidence of sexual side effects anyway? From the disclaimers on the Web site, it would appear that most of the people who would seek or use Wellbutrin ^tm are, well, outside the mainstream of human interaction already. In short, if you’re drugged out of your senses, then it would seem the only sex you might be betting would be the sort which, when a result of Rohypnol, is called Date Rape. In short, if you’re so fuzzy-headed you don’t know which end is up, someone’s probably taking advantage of that situation, and you don’t know much about it anyway, so again, who cares?

About that point in the research, I thought it would be nice to have the manufacturer’s name. But it is not to be found on the Web site I was viewing, the one through which you can place really big orders for the stuff. Still, looking for it was fun. That exercise revealed that the non-timed-release version of the drug, in its development and post-marketing phase (so apparently it was released for sale while still being developed? I thought the FDA was involved here….), offered lots of other side effects. Lots. I mean like a dozen or more for each of the systems in the human body, from brain to butt. These I really liked:

• cystitis
• abnormal ejaculation (AHA! again)
• urinary incontinence (lovely!)
• menopause (Why bother waiting for those hot flashes! Have them now!)
• penis disorder
• vaginitis

Those were not all of the genitourinary system disorders, just my favorites.

Some people will say I’m over-reacting or using scare tactics, or that I am politically incorrectly assaulting the hopes of the poor, downtrodden depressed population.

I say: If you think courting any one of the few possible side effects I have mentioned might be fun, why not do this? Just go find someone who has epilepsy and ask if he or she would recommend taking the chance of getting it. Ask someone with Parkinson’s disease if having tremors is a treat. Do you enjoy gaining weight? Swallowing Milk of Magnesia? Do you want your penis, for crying out loud, to be disordered? Or perhaps the sweats and cravings and sometimes hair loss and other menopausal excitements excite you.

I have been depressed. Everyone has been depressed. (Well, maybe not Dr. Phil or Dr. Wayne Dyer. But everyone else.) I may even, at times, have been clinically depressed. My mother was depressed forever. I have relatives who had been diagnosed with severe mood disorders. And I’m a freelance writer; I’m always living on the edge, always waiting for a check or screaming for it, and sometimes tucking my tail between my legs and asking friends or family for a bailout. Talk about depressed! I have found a good book, a glass of wine, a walk down a country lane, or even planning something pleasant helps. I may still feel depressed, but less so than otherwise, and a lot less so than risking any one of the disasters described on that Web site.

Even on my worst dark, lonely, depressed days—when my rent is due, the car needs work, my dog is out of food, I’ve had pasta for one week straight and my publishers still haven’t sent the check—you couldn’t pay me all the royalties of Gone with the Wind, Catcher in the Rye and the Harry Potter books combined to get me to swallow one single sample of Wellbutrin ^tm.

By the way, the manufacturer of the stuff is GlaxoSmithKline.