Yes, the health care bill is flawed. Exactly why are Democrats only blaming Democrats?

babylonsister

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Sun Dec-20-09 02:47 PM
Original message

Yes, the health care bill is flawed. Exactly why are Democrats only blaming Democrats?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-marmel/yes-the-health-care-bill_b_398530.html

Steve Marmel
Yes, the health care bill is flawed. Exactly why are Democrats only blaming Democrats?

snip//

I may not like every person with a "D" in front of their title, and I do not vote for every "D" I see. In 2008, I voted for Obama, because I was sick of a Republican party that shifted way right on me, and started cramming an "our way or the highway" point of view down my throat.

And that Republican party hasn't changed. If anything - by catering to birthers and evangelical hard-liners, they have gotten worse.

Every single Republican has lined up against this bill. Am I supposed to believe there wasn't ONE republican that wanted to make this work in either the house or the senate?

40 senators cannot agree on anything. Except, of course, that they want their White House back. And that's what this is all about.

These people with the "R" in front of their name lined up in unison at the beginning of this presidency, not over fighting any specific bill - they were fighting against ALL of them. They lined up in unison because they wanted Obama to fail. Not over health care. Not over climate change. They just want him to fail. Period.

It is that simple.

They wanted this to be, as lunatic Republican theocrat Jim DeMint said, the "waterloo that would break him." It may still yet.

It's not a flaw in the Democratic party that they had to compromise to get 60 of their members to agree on a piece of legislation. That's what a big tent is about. I, nor should any American, want the important debates of our day to be dictated without debate and dissent.

It is a flaw in the current version of the Republican party that not a single congressman or senator had the stones to vote for it. Not one. Everyone of these weak-willed individuals were in such fear of being lambasted - by the tea party, by the conservative media, by idealogues in their own party - that none of them had the courage to say "You know what? I'll vote for it if you include XXX."

Not one.

So yeah, we can all be disappointed in what this bill is, because of what this bill could have been.

But when I think about why it's not - as much as I'd like to leave a bag of burning dog crap on the doorsteps of people like Nelson and Lieberman... they, and the party in power, are not completely to blame for what happened here.

It's not the Democrats, who allowed dissent and debate, and were trying to accomplish a goal that a majority of Americans elected them to do that did this thing.

It's the Republicans who are running the next election campaign on every bill that comes through the House and Senate, that were the biggest roadblocks to what it seems a majority of Americans wanted.

So, no. I won't blame Obama for that. There are plenty of other things going on that have lessened my enthusiasm for this President. But on the issue of health care, I think he had no choice to be a pragmatist in the face of an enemy with a drone-like mindset of a Star Wars storm trooper.

And I will not have selective memory of that, come 2010 and 2012.