On negotiating

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the ongoing health care debate is not that several Republican officials and many right-wing members of the conservative movement are deliberately engaging in false lines of attack, but rather that so many Democrats are all too eager to strive for a 'compromise' with these folks.

Case in point - now we have word that the administration might be backing off the public insurance option due to Republican pressure. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I guess I honestly am (and, truth be told, I'm holding out hope that it's merely a political tactic designed to get the Senate to pass something so it can be repaired in a progressive-governed conference committee with the House leadership).

Quite frankly, given that 160 Republican amendments were included in the House legislation, I’m not entirely sure why a Democratic president elected less than one year ago by more than 60 million voters and a Democratic Congress which holds massive advantages in both the House and Senate thanks to huge electoral wins in 2006 and 2008 needs to be abandoning one of the central components of reform all to appease an unappeasable group.

And make no mistake, that’s exactly what the Republicans are.

This current crop of Republicans wants a political win, and the only way they can achieve a political win right now - given that they are out of power – is by defeating any measure of health care reform offered by a Democratic Congress and Democratic president. It’s why they embraced end-of-life counseling just a few months back and now call the same thing ‘death panels’ charged with systematically killing off the elderly. It’s why they’ve returned home during the Congressional recess and gone in front of hand-picked town halls to pat themselves on the back for ‘slowing down health care reform.’

They don’t want a compromise. They want to beat Obama and protect the profit-swollen private insurance industry, and if that means screwing over the more than 70 percent of the nation which favors a public insurance option, then so be it.

Why anyone would give serious credence to this type of insanity is beyond me, and any Democrat who aims to sit down and ‘negotiate’ with these folks is doing nothing but entertaining madness.