The text below is only an excerpt of Keith Olbermann's Special Comment last night about the fiasco known as health care reform. You can read Keith's entire comment here.
The last year has been hard for a lot of us. Joe and I, like many of you, busted our butts to get a Democratic Congress in 2006. Via this blog, we raised over $100,000 to help the Democrats in that year alone. We were there as well in 2008 for the presidentials. At the risk of alienating a good chunk of our readership, we came out swinging for President Obama early in the primaries. With the help of many of you, we raised $43,000 for candidate Obama, and were proud to do so. For that reason, it didn't give us any pleasure having to take the White House, our White House, on through much of this year. On issue after issue we cared about, our President was on the wrong side of his own campaign promises. When the moment called for courage, for backbone, and for action, our White House was AWOL time and time again. And our leadership in Congress, especially in the Senate, wasn't far behind.
The only silver lining I can give our readers, after what has been an incredibly dispiriting year, is that for those of you, who like us, helped put this President and this Congress into office, and who have been wondering if your growing concerns about our party have been warranted, Keith Olbermann's Special Comment is about a clear a sign as you could ask for that you were not wrong, that you are not alone.
Here's an excerpt:
Finally, as promised, a Special Comment on the latest version of H-R 35-90, the Senate Health Care Reform bill. To again quote Churchill after Munich, as I did six nights ago on this program: "I will begin by saying the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing: that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, without a war."...
[S]adly, the President has not provided the leadership his office demands.
He has badly misjudged the country's mood at all ends of the spectrum. There is no middle to coalesce here, Sir. There are only the uninformed, the bought-off, and the vast suffering majority for whom the urgency of now is a call from a collection agency or a threat of rescission of policy or a warning of expiration of services.
Sir, your hands-off approach, while nobly intended and perhaps yet some day applicable to the reality of an improved version of our nation, enabled the national humiliation that was the Town Halls and the insufferable Neanderthalian stupidity of Congressman Wilson and the street-walking of Mr. Lieberman.
Instead of continuing this snipe-hunt for the endangered and possibly extinct creature "bipartisanship," you need to push the Republicans around or cut them out or both. You need to threaten Democrats like Baucus and the others with the ends of their careers in the party. Instead, those Democrats have threatened you, and the Republicans have pushed you and cut you out....
Mr. President, they are calling you a socialist, a communist, a Marxist. You could be further to the right than Reagan - and this health care bill, as Howard Dean put it here last night, this bailout for the insurance industry, sure invites the comparison. And they will still call you names.
Sir, if they are going to call you a socialist no matter what you do, you have been given full unfettered freedom to do what you know is just. The bill may be the ultimate political manifesto, or it may be the most delicate of compromises. The firestorm will be the same. So why not give the haters, as the cliché goes, something to cry about.
