Andrew Sullivan, the day after Thanksgiving…

Laying awake the other early morning, the twin images of Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton kept coming into my mind. Maybe it was the Ambien, but inevitably the choice between those two haunts the fevered brow in the dead of night.

Pay attention here…he’s been prescribed a CPAP machine (which he’s previously written flowery praises of) and he’s taking Ambien on top of that and he Still can’t get to sleep.  I was on Ambien myself for a while and I’m here to tell you it knocked me flat. 

Problem was, it also fucked with my head.  Maybe some day I’ll go into more about the ugly episode in my life when I was dealing with insomnia and was taking sleep medication and eventually put onto a CPAP machine myself.  It was an adventure in our modern health care system that taught me in spades how little the system actually cares about your health, as opposed to selling you treatments.  There must still be some Baptist left in me because I’m feeling guilty right now as I type this at taking pleasure in the grim ironies in Sullivan’s predicament.  He’s been bellyaching ever since Michael Moore’s Sicko came out about how superior the American profit motive health care system is over the socialized health care systems used by every other industrial nation in the world, and there he is, a perfect example of what it does to people.  He’s on a CPAP machine, he’s downing Ambiens and he still can’t sleep.  But you best believe his doctors have another pill he can take for all of that.  And the best part is his sleepless nighttime is haunted by worries over the moral character of the person who will occupy the absolutist presidency left behind by George Bush, a man he once compared in a fit of giddy hero worship to Frodo, and then to Sam in Lord of The Rings.

You know…all that lefty field hippy stuff about eating more whole grains and fresh veggies and wholesome organically grown food and exercising more and keeping your weight down and not pigging out on junk food, really does go a long, long way toward getting you a good night’s sleep without drugs and machines pumping air into your lungs through a mask attached to an air hose.  Ask me how I know.  Ah…but that’s lefty stuff isn’t it Andrew…and that automatically makes it evil.  So you’ll be popping those pills and hooked up to that machine and staring at the ceiling wide awake in the middle of the night for all of that anyway for the rest of your life won’t you?

Good.  You made your bed, as the saying goes…