Watching in stark amaze as the issue of contraception coverage (contraception!) proves fraught enough with controversy that it troubles, still in the 21st century, the councils of the great and mighty, I am moved to reconsider some of my prior analysis of the great health care reform fiasco.

I had diligently wrenched reality around to maintain through most of the excruciating process via which Prez (ostensibly) sold out both the policy and the politics of his professed position, a cheerful optimism grounded in the conviction that Prez was letting his opponents overreach so they would fall into his trap.

Yeah, right.

In my subsequent disappointment, once it became clear the the public option had been laid upon the chopping block before the ink was even dry on the big pharma checks, I figured that for some reason Prez simply couldn't get past the Ben and Joe clown posse.

Perhaps, having thought the matter through with more thoroughness than I, Prez realized that a public option health care plan would inevitably run afoul of the Hyde Amendment.

Unwilling to take on that pernicious restraint on Federal funding of an important women's health issue, Prez might well have decided that discretion in this was was the better part of valor.

Considering the kerfuffle over contraception, imagine the war over a federally funded health plan that covered abortions.

One thing about Medicare, no one comes seeking reimbursement for abortion services. The Hyde amendment's strictures are already deforming the delivery of health services in no less important an arena than Military medical facilities. Likewise Medicaid cannot spend federal funds on abortion services. We may safely say, whatever other motivations weighed in when Prez sold the public option down the river, he was probably not sorry to be ducking the shitstorm over abortion coverage.