Failure all around, but great words

Health care. The Obama fiasco. Why, to fix what's wrong, did he want to take over what was working?

"The whole Obama era to date has been wasted in a historic, amateurish botch of the health-care issue. This began as a crusade for social justice — to cover the uninsured, whose numbers were suitably exaggerated, as most of them are people changing jobs from one health-insuring employer to another, or foreigners resident in this country, legally or otherwise, or the indigent, who are eligible for Medicaid." Conrad Black, a fan of FDR which I am not, continues here.

This writer uses magnificent phrases and words that I can't resist parsing:

• the president moved crisply
  
• hackneyed bunk
  
• political capital is evaporating
  
• create an appetite
  
• festooned every bill with pendulous payoffs [my favorite]
  
• a monstrosity of patronage and logrolling
  
• 2/3 of the stimulus is for dispersal closer to elections
  
• unemployment is knocking at the door of 10 percent
  
• [cap and trade] was based on the unproved Al Gore science-fiction vision of the environment
  
• politically hazardous reconciliation process
  
• [proposed tax increases] subject of an indecent amount of dissembling
  
• end America’s long reign as the world’s wealthiest per capita large country
  
• locked arms to over-empower the failed regulators
  
• sat mute as suet puddings [my second favorite]
  
• criminalization of policy differences
  
• neutered by the trial lawyers
  
• suborned by the dead hand of organized labor
  
• legislators are bound hand and foot to different special interests
  
• fable about huge numbers of people building windmills
  
• the world’s love for weak or at least misguidedly diffident American leaders
  
• the world’s most odious and hostile regimes, including those of Putin, Ahmadinejad, Chávez, and the Myanmar colonels
  
• Afghanistan has become a waffle
  
• [Biden] wants to fight the cave-dwelling terrorists of Waziristan from off-shore
  
• the political scientists of Hollywood
  
• [Peggy Noonan] briefly pixilated by Obamamania
  
• more of the same, only worse

"This president has achieved less in his first nine months than any incoming president since Warren Harding. It is not too late, but it looks now like the people will vote again for change, with increasing desperation, next year and in 2012. If the country does not get leadership equal to the scale of its problems, as it did in 1860 and 1932, the decline of America will move from a slope to a fall. This emperor still has no clothes, and it is not racism to notice it."