Michael Hirsch on Bush and Blackwater:

Imagine a universe where a man can gun down women and children anytime he pleases, knowing he will never be brought to justice. A place where morality is null and void, and arbitrary killing is the rule. A place that has been imagined hitherto only in nightmarish dystopian fiction, like “1984,” or in fevered passages from Dostoevsky—or which existed during the Holocaust and Stalinist purges and the Dark Ages. Well, that universe exists today. It is called Iraq. And the man who made it possible is George W. Bush.

Again, note the staggering fact that the allegedly sovereign government of Iraq has been allowing this state of affairs to persist for years and has already backed down from efforts to do otherwise. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the fundamentally imperial nature of the enterprise.

Matt Stoller thinks he disagrees with me about health care but really we’re more-or-less on the same page. I think these mandate-and-subsidize plans are badly flawed compromises. Democrats tend to embrace them because they think they’re more practical than even more ambitious schemes. But there’s really nothing especially practical about them. Their best elements — and you see this especially in John Edwards’ plan — tend to be efforts to trick congress into putting the country on a slippery-slope to a single-payer health care system. But the idea that you could pull a fast one on AHIP like that is silly. With all due respect to the cleverness of left-of-center wonks, nobody’s that clever.

Under the circumstances, the plans will either fail or else, as Matt says, “the best parts of the plan get removed in a compromise” and you wind up with something that’s not really worth passing. I would much rather see people trying to build support, directly, over the long run for single-payer health care and the marginalization of private sector insurance.

Incremental interim measures should be genuine increments — steps in the right direction — not efforts to square the interests sound health care policy with the financial interests of major insurance companies. John Kerry’s 2004 plan, which involved having the government step in to cope with super-catastrophic medical expenses, was good in this regard — a quite small measure that might have passed, but which created the sort of thing that could have been scaled up (or, in this case, down in terms of the threshold) over and over again, just as SCHIP expansion is a well Democrats can keep returning to until all children are covered, and then there can be efforts at expansion to parents, to college students, etc., etc., etc.

Krugman on health care:

The smear-and-fear campaign has already started. The Democratic plans all bear a strong resemblance to the health care plan that Mitt Romney signed into law as governor of Massachusetts, differing mainly in offering Americans additional choices. But that didn’t stop Mr. Romney from denouncing the Clinton plan as “European-style socialized medicine.” And Fred Thompson claims that the Clinton plan denies choice — which it actually offers in abundance — and relies on “punishment” instead.

There’s a problem here, though. Neither Krugman nor I actually believes that “European-style” constitutes a “smear” in the health care context. Nor do we believe that “European-style” health care is something people should be afraid of. But the Democrats, Clinton included, have assiduously attempted to differentiate their approaches to universal health insurance from “European-style” health care plans. This, though, puts liberals in an awkward position. Like in the famous Seinfeld episode, we need to angrily denounce insinuations that the Democrats are “European-style” but always with the caveat not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it seems to me that if we’re doomed to have a debate about European-style socialized medicine, we might as well propose European-style socialized medicine.