Ugliest Political Week in Memory

As health care fever spikes up, the body politic in woozy Washington is showing symptoms of a breakdown.

Democrats are struggling with parliamentary paralysis, Republicans are having apoplectic fits and Barack Obama is laying hands on everyone in sight with pleas to help a presidency on life support.

His agitation brought him to Fox News last night for a Tourette's Syndrome interview with someone named Bret Baier, who sat in the White House constantly interrupting the President with what the transcript describes as "cross talk" but sounded more like disrespectful baiting at cross purposes.

House Democrats have turned into babbling talking heads trying to explain "reconciliation" and "deem and pass" as stretcher bearers in the background search for arm-twisted victims to bring their body count to the needed 216.

Dennis Kucinich signed on yesterday, citing his worry that Republicans were not only attacking Barack Obama on the issue but trying to "delegitimize his presidency."

On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart offered a montage of right-wing raging, culminating in loony Rep. Steve King's call for a velvet revolution akin to the Prague uprising against Communism. But in what is called real life, Republicans are busy planning to repeal anything that passes after they take control of Congress in November.

Now that the CBO has put numbers on the proposed legislation ($940 billion over the first decade with deficit cuts of $130 billion and $1.2 trillion in the second), the stage is set for a Sunday vote that could put an end to the week's chaos that has been uglier than anything seen in Washington since the days of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, and we all know how long it took to recover from that.