Once in a while, actually quite frequently lately, a politician will say something so idiotic on its face that it becomes a test of the national credulity.
Harry Reid made such a statement a couple days ago. But first, there is an amazing conversation on the policy merits going on over at the new "Independent Voters" page. The current disapproval rating of Congress is 83%, including both Democrats AND Republicans. If independents coordinate and assemble themselves into a organized base, 2010 WILL be the year of the independents.
This is an opportunity for you to get in on the conceptual ground floor of this coming political tsunami on this new Facebook page.
You do NOT have to be a Facebook user to follow the dialog. And if you want to participate in the discussion all you need is a Facebook ID, even if you do nothing else on the Facebook site.
OK, here is what Harry Reid said, in defense of the fact that NO vote on any kind of public option was being allowed in the reconciliation bill for health care reform.
"I will work to ensure that we are able to vote on the public option in the coming months."
And when exactly would that be, Harry, AFTER the Senate goes back to requiring 60 votes to pass anything? Let us be clear, 51 senators WERE on the record that they supported a public option, even if it were only as weak as the one passed by the House. All they had to do was take a vote on it NOW, and it would have been the law of the land.
How stupid do they think we are?
Do they think they can chalk up 50 plus votes sometime later when it won't actually count at all and expect us to believe they really wanted to do it? NO!!! If they really wanted to do it they would have done it when they had not only the votes but the procedural path (reconciliation only needing 51 votes) to do it. All else is just a patently duplicitous fraud.
The argument we've been hearing from so many progressives who should know better was that this health care bill was "better than nothing". How much better than nothing? Barely? Hardly much? Did all of you work your buns off getting a new President and Congress elected to be told the best we can do is "better than nothing"?
The fact is the Democrats COULD have put real structural reform in place, instead of just throwing a couple colored sprinkles as selling points on top of this massive pile of corporate corruption being passed off as a health care bill. Instead of just a couple community health centers to sell our policy soul for we could have gotten what the compelling majority of the American people WANTED, which was a robust public option.
It could have been an expansion of the low overhead existing Medicare program. It could have been some other form of a single payer system. It could have provided for real competition for drug prices by allowing reimportation or government bargaining. It could have freed the states from the oppression of industry law suits through ERISA to stop them from caring for their own citizens. It could have done any of these things if just ONE member of Congress had put their foot down, and KEPT it down, demanding any of these things.
In short, we could have had a health care bill that would have been wildly popular with the American people, instead of a rallying flag for its own repeal, which is what we've got.
How stupid do they think we are?
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