By now, even Tibetans who live in caves and eat rope for a living have heard that Obamacare is an utter disaster. And that isn’t just the folks who can correctly add two numbers together and digest more than website headlines: these are HuffPo and New York Times readers—folks who can’t tell the difference between media slant and a whoopie cushion.

Seems that it’s official: Obamacare has no chance of fulfilling any one of its many promises, and will cost something like eleventy-trillion dollars an hour when fully done up. Even folks who were avoiding making any serious proclamations about it have concluded that this law must be repealed, stopped, or replaced with a market-based system.

Politics have nothing to do with it, either: this isn’t a case of it being woefully unpoplar; lots of unpopular things become law, and God knows that popularity doesn’t guarantee legislation, or else abortion would be gone and everyone would be armed and carrying.

No, this is a case of Obamacare being honest-to-goodness tango uniform: it simply cannot work as the law is written. And the Democrats who pushed so hard for it—to the point that the Constitution had to be ignored so that they could bring you something you did not want and certainly did not ask for—are embarrassed as hell about it.

What it all comes down to is basic incompetence. In 2009, Democrats suddenly found themselves in charge of both Houses and the Presidency. The very first thing they wanted to get passed, before anyone realized what was happening, was Healthcare Reform. In true Washingtonian speak, this meant “free healthcare.” As you know, this blew up badly for the Democrats in 1992, so they wanted to get it through the process as quickly as possible.

Do we have legislation written already? Of course, answered several Democrats. Banker’s boxes of ancient files were pulled out of basements and closets, broken open, and 5-1/4″ floppy disks were removed and had the dust blown off them. After spending several months trying to find a computer capable of reading WordPerfect 4.2 files, they cut and pasted dozens of pieces of legislation together and finally had the proposed bill.

You can read our own take of what came out of it. Even in bill form, you can easily see where the various different documents were slapdashed together.

The problem of course was that nobody wrote any of this. They just pasted it together.

Twenty years ago, a Democratic Congressperson was annoyed at how badly the Clinton gang screwed up the original HillaryCare proposals. “A monkey could do a better job,” thought each and every one of these people.

Instead, they asked an intern to do it. “Rosemary, or whatever your name is, can you write up a draft piece of legislation for healthcare coverage?” Each Congressperson elected to focus on something that bothered them specifically about the original: one guy wanted to address the need for review boards, another wanted to tax medical devices, a third want to create an exchange marketplace, and so on. “You can gloss over the rest,” the intern was told. “Just focus on those pieces for now.”

So then the intern, whose name was not Rosemary, got to work. She (or he) knew as much about healthcare policy and insurance provisioning as any 22-year-old political science major fresh out of grad school. After several months, the intern completed the assignment, which was then saved onto floppy and stuffed into a box for 20 years.

And then, in 2009, the various pieces were just stuffed together. Nobody read them because no one could. Having read the bill, it was stuffed with nonsense like “Section, added Pub. L. 89–358, § 2,Mar. 3, 1966, 80 Stat. 16, § 1673; amended Pub. L. 90–77, title III, §§ 302(a), 303 (a),Aug. 31, 1967, 81 Stat. 185; Pub. L. 91–219, title II, § 202,Mar. 26, 1970, 84 Stat. 78; Pub. L. 92–540, title IV, § 401(2),Oct. 24, 1972, 86 Stat. 1090; Pub. L. 93–508, title II, § 203,Dec. 3, 1974, 88 Stat. 1582; Pub. L. 94–502, title II, §§ 205, 211(7),Oct. 15, 1976, 90 Stat. 2387, 2388; Pub. L. 95–202, title III, § 305(a)(2),Nov. 23, 1977, 91 Stat. 1443; Pub. L. 96–466, title III, §§ 303–305,Oct. 17, 1980, 94 Stat. 2192, 2193; Pub. L. 97–35, title XX, § 2003(b)(2),Aug. 13, 1981, 95 Stat. 782; Pub. L. 97–295, § 4(40),Oct. 12, 1982, 96 Stat. 1308; Pub. L. 97–306, title II, §§ 202(a), 203(a),Oct. 14, 1982, 96 Stat. 1433; Pub. L. 98–525, title VII, § 703(b),Oct. 19, 1984, 98 Stat. 2564; Pub. L. 100–689, title I, § 111(a)(9),Nov. 18, 1988, 102 Stat. 4172; Pub. L. 101–237, title IV, § 423(b)(1),Dec. 18, 1989, 103 Stat. 2092; renumbered § 3473 and amended Pub. L. 102–83, § 5(a), (c)(1),Aug. 6, 1991, 105 Stat. 406, related to disapproval of enrollment in certain courses.”

Who the hell is going to look all those up? Nobody, that’s who—and off they went, assuming that the great Senator Stromby Moxweather (D), who was an expert on veterans’ affaris, knew what the hell he was writing about in 1993. Except the above was written by a person who, 18 months before, was drinking melted watermelon shots off another dude’s chest because it seemed so funny at the time when the music was that loud. Where the hell was that party again?

Of couse, some people did start to look up these references and quickly concluded that Obamacare would be a total disaster—not just bad for America, but really shitty legislation on its own. Warning after warning came out that this would fail, be unsustainable on its face, and create the exact opposite of its goal: an exorbitant nightmare that would deny coverage to anyone who actually wanted it.

And so here we are. It is 2013, and even the original proponents of the bill are saying this thing is a travesty. Imagine that.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.