Did Rush Limbaugh finally get to David Brooks? How else to explain Brook’s about face on Obama, whom Brooks has repeatedly praised for his thoughtful, measured, and centrist decisions — i.e., those that David agreed with — but whom Brooks now not-so-subtly equates with Russian Czars and fascist jack boots?

Today’s snarky column, And the Angels Rejoice, aligns Brooks with the nuttiest of the nutty, ridiculing Obama for behaving like a Czarist/fascist dictator in torturing — as "in the disembowlment scene from ‘Braveheart’" — America’s corporate elites. Brooks explains our corporate titans’ forced willingness to be perceived as cooperating with a popular President:

Then the president leads the executives out onto the White House lawn for the announcement ceremony. Often, the president will still be carrying the riding crop and the pliers used in the private negotiation. He moves to the microphone while the executives take their pre-assigned places behind him, the jingle of their leg shackles blending with the dulcet tones of spring. I thought one hospital executive was so moved by the occasion that he had slipped into catatonic shock, except that he was blinking “Save Me! Save Me!” in Morse code to his shareholders.

“We meet at an exciting moment for our country, a time of unprecedented cooperation between government and private industry,” the president intones, lifting his foot from the trachea of an unconscious pharmaceutical executive.

Yes, America’s corporate elites have truly been tortured by this brutal regime. Obama has only saved both GM and Chrysler from uncontrolled bankruptcy, while keeping them afloat with tens of billions in loans and guarantees while muscling their workers and lenders to accept deep concesions. His jackboot on the throats of the financial industry elites consists of several trillion dollars in bailouts, loans, loan and deposit guarantees, a misunderstood assets purchase plan designed to give the banksters free capital, and a proposed set of reforms that leaves the Masters of the Universe in place while assuming too big to fail merely means we need to watch them more closely, but by the same people who missed the $8 trillion housing buble and thought deregulating the financial industry was good for America.

But it’s Brooks’ weeping for the health/insurance industry that most touches me. You’d think Obama is planning to dismantle the private health insurance system, bust up Big Pharma, and force the oligopolies to disgorge ill-gotten gains:

During the press conference with health care executives, I don’t even think Obama meant to give away $2 trillion of their money. He was going to give away just $750 billion, but he got carried away by the Era of Responsibility. “The stakeholders behind me have promised to cut costs by nearly 2 percent a year,” the president riffed. (The executives’ lips were like dead worms stretched across mirthless smiles. Their cheeks were like hardened clumps of concrete.) “They have agreed to support the administration’s reform package.” (Coronaries, epileptic seizures all around.) “They have agreed to donate their kidneys in my office right after this ceremony.” (The executives were now flopping about the stage, like a 3-D version of the Heimlich poster.)

These executives have been invited to make these donations in the same spirit that the Cossacks invited my ancestors to emigrate to the Lower East Side.

(emphasis mine)

Notice how Brooks casts essential efforts to reduce ballooing health care costs as stealing "their money," as though the insurance industry and Big Pharma earned the $2 trillion in excessive administrative/advertising costs and profits. How dare we ask for a refund?

But every responsible study of the US health system says it’s not their money, it’s our money. It’s money that other nations don’t give away to insurance/drug oligopolies via excess admin costs/profits. It’s money we could better use by covering the 47 million uninsured and the tens of millions more that are poorly or fraudulently covered by an industry whose profitability depends on denying care, rationing by price and screwing the public, while continuing to consolidate market power to keep prices/premiums too high.

And where is Obama’s boot on their necks? It’s nowhere to be seen. The President who promised a public health plan to compete against the dysfunctional, unsustainable private insurance system is letting the Senate throw advocates of a public plan for all out of the hearing room (the entire Bill Moyer’s Journal segment on single payer is worth watching), while Senate leaders water down even the "public insurance option" half measure by confusing it with an "insurance pool," or "exchange."

So after all of this brutal pressure from Obama, are the insurance/HMO/Pharma Titans falling in line to support a public health otion? Are they dealing in good faith? Are you kidding? Just ask Harry and Louise. And always. follow. the. money.

Background on the confusion over the definition of a "public plan" and related topics:
Sherrod Brown, Senators Introduce Resolution Calling for Consumer Choice in Health Care Reform
Des Moines Register on Sen. Grassley views on public health option

Institute for America’s Future, A Public Health Insurance Plan
The Hill, Kennedy Affirms Support for a Public Healthcare Plan
Economic Policy Institute, Alexander Hertel, Why a Public Insurance Plan is Essential to Health Reform
SEIU, Stop the Swift-boating of Health Care
Newseek, A Public Plan Will Reduce Costs and Improve Access