Olbermann on the healthcare travesty
Spend 12 minutes listening to the best commentary I’ve heard on the healthcare mess, from MS-NBC’s Keith Olbermann.
He is the only other person I’ve heard advocating my viewpoint: that since compromise isn’t working anyway, since the right-wing nutters will call you a socialist no matter what you do, you may as well fight for what we really need, and then in the next elections call down the progressive forces to sweep out the GOP and BlueDog intransigents, along with the ever-more-loathsome Joe Lieberman. Letting the bill go down in flames and then bringing it back as a campaign tool is a far more sensible strategy to me than chipping and chipping away at the reforms until there’s nothing left other than total capitulation to the insurance industry. This bill embodies everything wrong about the legislative process: the influence of big lobbying and big campaign money, the people shut out from the beginning, even Sanders being forced to abandon the single-payer vote on a parliamentary procedure trick.
Like Olbermann, and like Howard Dean, if I were in the Senate, I’d be voting no until there are some crumbs in here for ordinary Americans. First Obama and Baucus rejected single-payer—what we really want and NEED—in favor of the very limited “public option.” Then they traded that away for extension of Medicare. Then they traded THAT away…for what? For the unreliable promise of a possible (not definite) yes vote from Lieberman!
Progressive Senators like Sanders and a few others need to tell Obama and Ried tht this bill is not one they can vote for. Let the bill grind to a halt! We can play this kind of hardball as well. When there’s nothing to vote for, it’s time to vote no.
I’ll be urging my own Senators to do so later today. Not in a petition but in a personal letter. When I’ve done the letter, I’ll post it here, and I give open permission to copy it in whole or in part to contact your own Senators.
I’m also going to ask MSNBC for a transcript of Olbermann’s remarks, and permission to post it.
