The phenomenon of Mr Obama began with Mr Reagan and continued with all the presidencies since. By nature, the hermeneutic of television/new media avoids real issues. If you can’t distill it into 140 characters or 15 seconds, it’s useless.

The simple truth is that American citizens know the health insurance system is broken, and has been for years. The GOP never offered a way to fix it, and how are we to interpret the virulent opposition to insurance reform as anything more than a tantrum?

Constitutionally, the GOP lacks the votes to get much of any insurance reform undone. And as long as they stand up for their cronies on Wall Street and continue attacking (largely) women’s unions, I don’t see them making any progress in 2012.

You want real issues? You’d better inform the GOP frontrunners. They’re talking about Kenya and Poland this week. Good luck with that. The Dems may be crass and incompetent, but the GOP is a comedy routine waiting for its next sex scandal.

Personally, I think insurance reform under Mr Obama has been far too conservative. But he’s blocking any shift to the Right and the corporations are blocking any real reform. So we hjave a little nudge nobody is very happy with. That’s called compromise.

Not really much of a surprise. The average attention span of the US citizen is about 30 seconds. Which is why we have Obama. He begins each speech with revisionist history which would not stand the scrutiny of even rudimentary historical awareness. He twists history to define an issue in a certain way, after which his proposed non-solutions to incorrectly-defined problems seem all too plausible.

And, of course, this short attention span is why we also have Obamacare. Which is not a misleading term, it’s simply a new word which has a specific meaning in our language, by common agreed usage. In other words, it has the same status as every other word we use! Get over this pointless twaddle about the word, people, and let’s use our energy to debate real issues. God knows we have plenty of them!

One number might be higher than 52%, the notion that this is primarily about health care, when in actuality, it’s about health care insurance.

All too many people believe (or peddle the belief) that what’s up for grabs here is health care. The US already provides excellent medical care to the injured, the sick, and those who aspire to avoid either.

The problem is with a lack of honest insurance, and choices for medical care if one is not very rich.

Mr Carter and many others need schooling: please refer to all this as health insurance reform.

“The term “Obamacare” is indeed prejudicial; it implies that only one person really supports it, or attempts to present it as a personal eccentricity.”

not apply to “Bush tax cuts.” The Bush tax cuts were enacted with votes from both parties; were the result of negotiations; had massive support from the public; and were not the brainchild of one man and were certainly not a “personal eccentricity.”

On the basis of Joe’s defense that “Obamacare” is simply short hand that everyone understands, I don’t think that Jamie’s point is a reason to stop using the term, even though his(?) point is a reasonable one by itself. But I really think you can’t defend the use of “Bush tax cuts” while condemning “Obamacare” without looking pretty foolish. If it’s “tone deaf” not to realize that Obamacare casts a certain light on the health care financing law, what is it not to realize that invoking “Bush tax cuts Bush tax cuts Bush tax cuts” every time someone doesn’t want to raise the current tax rates, casts a certain light on tax policy?

I made a point about responsible language. But now, it seems, I must make a point about responsible thought. To think responsibly requires attention to what is salient and distinctive about a particular case. There are similarities and there are differences, and it is a fallacy simply to focus on the similarities shared by “Obamacare,” “Bush tax cuts,” and “Code Napoleon.”

It isn’t any kind of fallacy because it wasn’t meant to be an argument. However, I was pointing out the irony of people who have no problem identifying policies they don’t like with political leaders they don’t like, making a precise logical case out of why we shouldn’t do that. Maybe they’re right, but pots and kettles and all that.

Of course, another rhetorical flourish is to dwell on insignificant details in order to ignore the significance of a larger fact. Not that we see any of that around here…