The discerning listener will have witnessed a subtle change in the language of healthcare reform. Some weeks ago when no one noticed the sponsors of reform altered the language. It was no longer healthcare reform. It was health insurance reform.

Barring the unexpected what emerges from reconciliation will fall dramatically short of healthcare reform. We will move closer to the mathematics of universal health insurance but no closer to universal healthcare. Most importantly, will move no closer to realizing the basic principle of healthcare as a right of citizenship - indeed a fundamental human right.

No matter how the leaders of this legislation coax it, a health insurance mandate is antithetical to the very concept of a fundamental right. Should I be compelled to pay a fee for the right to free speech, the right to gather in protest and voice my grievance, the right to worship as my conscience demands, the right to information and analysis from whatever sources I choose, the right to form a labor union, the right to representation in a court of law, the right to think and express thoughts in whatever form and manner I choose so long as I do not infringe on the rights of others?

The president’s once powerful electoral mandate is vanishing like the habitat of the endangered polar bear. The Republicans, only six months ago a corpse awaiting burial, is alive and kicking once again and the once dominant Democrats are now scrambling for cover.

How did it happen, why and can it be turned around?

Forget Joe Lieberman. We’ve seen this act before. He is the recalcitrant child: The more you chastise him, the more he acts out. Forget applying political pressure from the left. He is immune. There is not a Democrat in the land who honestly believes he is a member of their party. His remaining time in the Senate is dedicated to building Republican credentials so that he can transition from electoral politics to a Republican White House. Lieberman should be impeached as a liar and a fraud. He is a calculating hustler who wants nothing more than to go down in history as the man who stood in the way of systemic change. That he has done so at such a critical time will be his enduring shame but Joe wears the mantle of obstructionist with pride.

It is a great shame that in America we cannot criticize our nation without being painted in the colors of betrayal and treason by the self-righteous and self-proclaimed defenders of American pride. Yes, even those who only yesterday led the nation to the edge of economic collapse and left our reputation torn and tattered before the eyes of the world retain their hold on power by defining patriotism with unwavering praise and effectively denouncing anyone who does not adhere.

So it is that our president on the occasion of his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize assumed the role of head cheerleader – a role better suited to his predecessor than to the candidate who succeeded on the promise of change.

It is a role that seemingly every president must assume yet to have embraced it so soon and on such an ironic occasion is deeply disappointing.

'As Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.'

'Under the banner of … domestic unity and international legitimacy - and only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden - we sent our troops into Afghanistan. Within a matter of months, al Qaeda was scattered and many of its operatives were killed.' - President Barack Obama, West Point, December 1, 2009.

In August 1964 President Lyndon Johnson reported to congress that the North Vietnamese had attacked an American war ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. It was the lie that gave Johnson legal authority to escalate the Vietnam War.

We have spent the better part of a year locked in a tedious and unenlightening debate over health care while the jobless rate has steadily surged. It’s now at 10.2 percent. Families struggling with job losses, home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies are falling out of the middle class like fruit through the bottom of a rotten basket. - Bob Herbert, Columnist.

On the same day a government report revealed that the official unemployment rate unexpectedly topped ten percent the Dow Jones Industrial Average held its ground above the symbolic 10,000 mark. Since March the Dow has surged over 3,500 points while the unemployment rate has witnessed a steady rise to the highest figure in a quarter century.

The positive correlation between the Dow and unemployment is powerful evidence that the creative minds of Wall Street do not believe corporate profits are dependent on a thriving American working class. Indeed, since their mindless manipulations of the marketplace nearly triggered a total meltdown and a global depression, they have assumed an attitude of unabated arrogance. Their perception of events appears to be that they played it to their advantage. They won. They parlayed their collective failure into a multi trillion-dollar gift from the government that they used to line the pockets of their executives while further consolidating wealth and successfully fighting back congressional attempts to reassert regulation of the marketplace.

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.