The read

From my mid-week column in the Athens Banner-Herald ...

To say Broun has a habit of being misleadingly melodramatic is to say a pig likes to play in the mud. Of course, the only difference is the pig has enough common sense to recognize when it's covered head to toe in filth.

There's a very serious, substantive debate going on right now in Washington, D.C., concerning a massive overhaul of a health care system in dire need of reform. It features various ideas pulled from all sorts of ideological perspectives, but, sadly, there seems to be only one political party willing to work on fixing this broken system.

Broun and his Republican colleagues in Congress - contrary to the vast majority of their supporters across the country - have no real interest in pursuing any measure of reform. Instead, they want a political win, and, to them, that win means offering nothing of value to the debate, while purposefully slowing down the process in an attempt to choke it to death.

A case in point: One health care reform bill that was just passed out of committee in the House of Representatives did so with the inclusion of 160 Republican amendments, but no Republican votes. In the Senate, another committee is spinning its wheels in what appears to be a hopeless attempt to find a compromise on the public insurance option, the centerpiece of the bill.

So, with that in mind, Broun says a public option will kill people and destroy freedom.