WARNING: This is a post about healthcare and the execrable Joe Lieberman. If you come at me trying to compare the politics of Hillary Rodham Clinton to Joe Fucking Lieberman, I will get in my car and I will find you and follow you around for the rest of your life hollering that Hillary Clinton was busting her ass trying to get us to universal coverage 25 damn years ago.
I just heard Jon Lovett do an opening rant about Joe Lieberman (who is execrable) on this week's Lovett or Leave It in which he explained how Joe Lieberman, all by his little self, killed the Medicare Buy-In for 55 yr old + Americans. Had he not killed it, people 55 and over wouldn't have to keep killing themselves to hold onto their corporate health insurance and young people would be paying lower premiums as older people cost more to keep healthy, and thus drive premiums up. Joe Lieberman was working for the insurance companies who are, I genuinely believe, more evil that Philip Morris.
Speaking of which, I also read an article this morning over on Splinter about a British woman who was diagnosed with lung cancer and who is on the path to healing due to government-provided health care. She will not end up broke. She won't end up scrabbling to come up with thousands of dollars to pay for life-requiring medicine. She'll just get better.
On the liberal scale, I'm pretty far left. I also believe, though, in incrementalism and that you can get away with being more liberal in New York and Chicago than you can in West Virginia. I think expanding already popular programs is a more practical path towards healthcare-for-all than blowing up what we could get into law despite the nasty little corporate shitheels like Joe Lieberman. I could well be wrong and I'm happy to have that argument. This isn't about that, though. This is about how my party, the Democratic party, has a long history of letting the right intimidate them not into moderating radical leftish positions, but rather into radicalizing moderate positions.
Government-backed healthcare is not a radical position. It is as practical a position as one can take in American politics. It makes fiscal, moral and political sense. The system we have now is radical. It's breathtakingly expensive and irredeemably cruel. I don't want any Democrat, any liberal or any person trying to tell anyone running for any office, especially if they are running in an already liberal district, that they should not be agitating for it. If you let the nasty little corporate shitheels tell you that a congressional candidate in Queens can cost you an election in West Virginia, you've already conceded a radical argument. Stop it.
Let's all remember that it doesn't matter what a democrat running for office says; the toadies at the GOP propaganda network will lie about it. For instance: not one democrat is agitating for open borders. The right-wing noise machine (led by our feckless, traitorous president) says they are on the daily. Not one democrat is agitating to ban guns, but likely every member of the NRA believes they are because they are being told they are by rightwing liars.
So let's just stop letting them set the terms for the debate. They are skilled liars and easy manipulators. Fuck 'em. Just say what you really believe and stop giving a shit what Tucker Carlson pretends to get his knickers in a twist over.
