Now showing in the Democratic Senate: "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers"

The other day I was watching cable news between severe bouts of politico-clinical depression when on the screen up popped the melancholic Sen. Chuck Grassley in an interview, not exactly what the doctor ordered.

He was, naturally, first randy to do something more than what Obama is doing about Iran -- precisely what, remained a mystery -- and that part of the interview was harmless enough.

But soon there rolled around the issue of health care.

Grassley, as we all know, sits on Max Baucus' powerful, health-care-unreforming finance committee, and as such has risen to the top of what Baucus selectively, disingenuously calls his "Coalition of the Willing" -- a tidy, ideologically close-knit little band of arch-do-nothings, excluding, obviously, senators such as health subcommittee (of the finance committee) chairman Jay Rockefeller, who "has clashed with Baucus" for "advocating liberal proposals, such as a strong public-insurance option, that Baucus does not believe can pass the Senate."

And just why does Baucus believe so fervently that a "strong public-insurance option" can't pass? Because Baucus, in holding hands with the Chuck Grassleys of the so-called opposition, fervently works to see that it can't.

He wants, he says, bipartisanship.

So back to the Grassley interview, in which the network host finally comprehended the staggeringly manifest: Senator, are you saying that a bipartisan health-care bill must necessarily exclude even the consideration of a public plan?

"Absolutely," said Chuck, thereby reducing the bi-partisan to a singular GOP formulation, and thereby making a mockery of Baucus' "bipartisanship."

Which, in effect, makes Republican Senator Chuck Grassley not only the co-chairman of the Democratic-majority finance committee, but co-majority leader of the Democratic Senate, given the overarching importance of health-care reform -- all of which, as I discussed in this morning's column, will rightly cost the Democrats, big time, in 2010.

They just don't "get it."