Public Option Declared Dead, Again

Believing in pixie dust and fairytales is the Democrat way

Yeah, kind of like believing cutting taxes will lead to increased revenues...or how Ronaldus Maximus never raised taxes and balanced the budget...or how George W. kept us safe for 8 yrs...or how torture worked...or how we'd be treated as liberators....

History will tell who has truly been lacking in vision in this fight. Right now, if we're betting on who history is going to deem the blind ones, my money like Chait's, is still on people the people who keep talking like you do.

Here's the money quotes for those who don't want to click on the link:

Without a doubt, Obama's proposals would leave the health care system far short of what most progressives, myself included, would design in the absence of political constraints. But also without a doubt, it would lift the system far above the status quo that is the only near-term alternative. Here it is, the most dramatic improvement in social justice in at least four decades fighting for its life in the home stretch, and the left can barely be roused to fight for it. The somnolence is far from universal, but on the left there is at least as much passion against health care reform as for it. One of many considerations the vulnerable Democratic moderates who hold reform's fate in their hands must balance is, in return for the limitless rage of the right, will they get any credit from the left for backing this reform? At the moment when every voice counts, when every ounce of pressure could prove decisive, here is FireDogLake:

Lynn Woolsey says she’s a definite “yes” vote on the Senate health care bill. Even if it lacks a public option. Despite the fact that it’s the biggest blow to a woman’s right to choose in a generation, and may come at the price of a stand-alone vote that allows Blue Dogs and ConservaDems to join with Republicans and roll them back even further in order to get Bart Stupak’s support.

Any ability for progressives to negotiate, to achieve meaningful concessions, to exert their influence and make the bill better just disappeared.

It’s time for Lynn Woolsey to resign as the head of the Progressive Caucus.

Yes, that is what it is time for! One day, when progressives study this moment in history, they will evaluate all of us by this single standard: What did they do to stop Lynn Woolsey?

* * *

I don't mean to be too glum. Heath care reforms still stands a good chance of passage, and it hardly lacks for supporters. Still, the general thrust of elite sentiment has been, as I said, depressingly myopic. It's natural to focus on improving a piece of legislation whose details remain in flux. The problem comes when the desire to improve becomes the dole focus for evaluating it. Nearly any of the great political advances in American history, viewed from ground level, looked like a pastiche of grubby compromises and half measures. At some point the imperative is to take the broader view. If they ever do that-- whether health care reform succeeds or fails -- the critics from the delusional left, the hysterical right and the sullen center will feel ashamed.

Emphasis is mine.

That's what those of us who are onboard are talking about when we lose patience (hardly an uncommon occurance for either side in this fight) and talk about "unicorns and rainbows." We have enough understanding of history--history in the sense of what happened before whatever year it was that we realized we actually cared who was president--that we fully realize that "[n]early any of the great political advances in American history, viewed from ground level, looked like a pastiche of grubby compromises and half measures."

And we recognize that this is one of them and it looks exactly the way anyone with any real understanding of American history, or indeed any understanding of how things happen in a pluralistic democracies in general, would expect it to look. Unsatisfactory. Less than anyone wants. Tangled and overly complex and larded up with stuff we hate.

But better than what we have now and better than anything else we stand any realistic chance of getting any time soon because this is what happens when social progress meets democracy in a system that is functionally (or dysfunctionally) equivilent to a multiparty parlimentary system.

Better. That's what you can get and when it's in reach you take it and then you keep trying to build on it and make it better still.

The only people on the left who can't see that it's better are the ones who are so invested in their own need to have been right all along that they resort to to fact-free prognostications about how the insurance companies will sell "worthless" policies (because, after all no insurance company in the history of the Republic has ever paid for medical bills). Or the one about how the fact that the proposed law still allows recission for fraud necessarily means they will continue to rescind on the basis of undisclosed preexisting conditions. Never mind that that assertion is demonstrably false if you know anything about law--it must be true because if it isn't, the firebagger line both wrong and immoral.

Or you know, maybe I'm wrong. I'll at least admit that possibility. Maybe this will be the worstest, most awfulest thing that could ever happened to the American People and nothing truly is better than this bill. Letting people die for lack of insurance is preferable to this bill. And maybe the certainty that if it dies, we'll be handing Congress over to the Republicans for the next four years isn't even a valid consideration.

But right now, like you, I can only see what I can see and history will judge which of us see furthest.

Dems don't expect to earn your money and/or vote since you declared more than a year ago that you left the Democratic party and would never vote for or give money to Democrats again. *yawns*

Can you keep your word and get the fuck out? Take NR (nearly retarded) with you, OK?