Bill Moyers: Alliance of Health Industry & the Right Stop at Nothing to Derail Progressive Reforms

[marmar]

Bill Moyers: Dangerous Alliance of Health Industry and Right-Wingers Will Stop at Nothing to Derail Progressive Reforms

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, AlterNet. Posted July 27, 2009.

As Republicans fire away on health reform, big business is stepping up attacks too, lobbying and advertising guns blazing.




Push finally came to shove in Washington this past week as the battle for health care escalated from scattered sniper fire into all-out combat. If it all seems to be getting more and more confusing, join the club. It's hard to see what's happening through all the gun smoke.

The Republicans have more than health care reform in their bombsights -- they want a loss for Obama so crushing it will bring the administration to its knees and restore GOP control of Congress after next year's elections.

In the words of Republican Senator Jim DeMint, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

The "Waterloo" of DeMint's metaphor, of course, is not the 1974 Abba hit but the battle in 1815 that ended Napoleon Bonaparte's rule as Emperor of France -- a humiliating defeat and a turning point in European history. Right-wingers like Glenn Beck see Obama as Napoleon incarnate, a popular emperor who must be stopped.

Here's what Beck said on his television show Monday, July 20: "I'm telling you, this guy is dangerous. He's never lost before. He won't understand ... like, 'Who are you to question me?' I mean, this guy is practically an imperial President now. When he starts to lose and people start to question him and push him back against the wall, he's not gonna know how to react." .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/141566/bill_moyers%3A_dangerous_alliance_of_health_industry_and_right-wingers_will_stop_at_nothing_to_derail_progressive_reforms/

[KoKo]

1. "Could it be that Harry and Louise are happier, because this time they're in on the deal?"

More from the article:

President Obama rejected the Republicans' Waterloo metaphor and mounted a massive media counteroffensive of his own. But the President has already run into booby traps of his own making and minefields laid by members of his own party, exacerbated when the Congressional Budget Office reported that reform plans, instead of controlling costs, would send the national debt further into the stratosphere.

Meanwhile, supporters who want to scrap the present system for fundamental change are staring glumly though the fog of war at a battlefield in total disarray.

They fear that in the White House's desire to get a bill -- any bill - passed by Congress, it will have been so compromised, so bent to favor the big interests, that it will be less Waterloo than watered down, a steady diluting of the change they had hoped for and that America needs.
-snip-
No wonder the cost of reform keeps going up and up and up. Could it be that Harry and Louise are happier because, this time, they're in on the deal?