The sobering news coming yesterday, that the “public option” for national health care reform simply may not fly, calls into question two issues.

The first is whether or not there can be effective reform to contain the skyrocketing cost of private health care without a catastrophic decline in the quality of care. I think not.

The second goes to the issue of how Washington works, even in cases where one party, the one ostensibly favoring a genuine improvement of the quality of health care for the American public, is in such overwhelming control.

How is it that something like the “public option,” which comes in far short of the preferable “single payer” approach and received so much adamant support from a majority of the Democrats who control both houses of Congress and the White House, is now in its political death throes?

It illustrates a painful point for the American people to absorb. This, and many other issues in Washington, has too little to do with Democrats and Republicans. The entire mapping of American politics, as reinforced by all the pundits, the newspapers, the opinion makers, the party leaders and the elected officials, themselves, is largely a fallacy.

If it weren’t, then there would be no explanation for why one party, so dominant in Washington now, would so readily abandon a vital cornerstone of what it allegedly stands for.

No, politics in America is not about parties, in the final analysis, it is about class. It is the uber-rich and powerful versus grievously underrepresented average and severely under-privileged Americans.

The uber-rich and powerful win allies among the masses through a constant barrage of disinformation, illusion and appeal to fear and prejudice. They keep repeating their mantra like the “hate” sessions in Orwell’s 1984, and thereby drag enough of the very people they are screwing along with them as shock troops.

In the current circumstance, operating through fronts like Freedom Works, the propagandistic Fox News Network and buoyed by phony rationales cooked up by radical free-market Washington so-called think tanks, the uber-rich are pulling out all the stops, and unleashing their unwashed masses into the streets with abandon in what will most likely escalate into increasingly violent riots and criminal acts.

Among the elected officials in Washington, who are expected to exhibit a modicum of decorum (although that does not hold for attacks on President Obama), the uber-rich have a time-tested system of elevating the types of political leaders who can be turned to their advantage, no matter their ostensible outward philosophies.

The uber-rich select elected officials who can be controlled by one of four elements well known from the old Cold War days to be methods used to recruit spies and counterspies. The acronym for it was “MICE,” and it refers to money, ideology, compromise and ego. Find weaknesses in someone based on one or more of those four elements, and you can exploit and turn that person to your will.

Not all, but far too much of elected Washington, and elected bodies all across the land, are defined by the uber-rich’s execution of the “MICE” principle.

“Compromise” is among the least apparent and most efficient components. It is another word for blackmail, or fear of exposing dark secrets.

Oh, how the agents of the uber-rich love to find conservatives and right wingers who are closeted gays, for example. How they can twist them around their fingers!

How many cases have there been of arch right wingers being “outed” one way or another as gays, and leaving their posts in disgrace in recent years? Indeed, there is always the chance that the hidden side of someone will come out in a way that destroys their usefulness to the uber-rich, but that’s an understood liability.

The fact that Gov. Crist of Florida is being touted as GOP presidential timber is a prime case. He was effectively “outed” in the documentary film, “Outrage,” released this summer, but the uber-rich-controlled media was ordered to keep this secret quiet so the man could continue to be a totally-controlled commodity.

So, it’s not Democrats versus Republicans as much as it’s “MICE” versus the people.