Once again, somebody is trying deflect the issue of health care reform stirring up blogmob hatred of one of our most influential advocates - Jane Hamsher. Once again, many self-dubbed progressives are eating it up, jumping into the moshpit and gleefully wallowing in this childish sleaze like pigs in the mud. I'm not so worried about where basic civility went in this debate. People get worked up. That's fine - good even. What I'm worried about is what has happened to shame.
Here's a newsflash that, I'm sure some of the folks in the other recc'd diary know, but chose to avoid, because its way too convenient to paint Hamsher as some evil outsider bent on attacking their heroic Senator. I'm a Vermonter, I admin one of the leading blogs in Vermont, and I signed that letter too. And I'll be damned if someone can tell me that I have no business holding my own Senator accountable, just because its a convenient excuse to join into the hate-pile-on that characterizes the new strategy of personal smear that the Lanny Davis crowd has so embraced.
After the flip for some of what other "real Vermonters" are saying, and what some other people who know what they're talking about have to say about ones's right to be heard on the most important issue of my generation.
Again, to recap. Some of us believe that:
First: The Senate Bill must be stopped. It will do more harm than good.
Second: In recognizing that, we have a moral responsibility to try and stop it.
Third: Our elected officials - including our President, and including every one of the 60 Senators who voted for closure - bear responsibility - and certainly have the power - for stopping it or letting it become law.
Fourth: Promises of "fixing it later" will not come to pass, because this is the last issue this legilature will ever want to take up again, given how its gone.
...and finally, in this particular instance...
Fifth: A very few Senators are actually smart enough to see the trouble we'll be in if this becomes law - and they are the ones we should talk to because they get what we're saying.
In the case of Sanders its even more clear, as he was on the razor's edge of not supporting this bill until he carved out some money for his priorities into the final package. For my part, I personally feel responsible for not beginning the pressure a week earlier, when he was actively deliberating, and when our chances to get through to him would have been that much stronger.
But that doesn't mitigate my responsibility to do what I can at all. Nor does it mitigate my right to.
And of course I wanted FDL's help. In fact, you wanna mob someone about their involvement, I'm your guy. I approached them. They reach Vermonters I don't.
So, to the blogmob: Here's the link to Green Mountain Daily. Sure, not all our front pagers agree with my "kill the Senate bill" stance (which is fine with me), but don't let that stop you. Come on over. Hate us all up real good. Because we fight for what we believe in. Because we fight for real health care reform. Share some of that bile that comes bubbling up at the thought of FDL or whatever with us.
Then take a long look in the mirror.
At our site there's a healthy, quite heated debate, but it hasn't turned into this kind of disgraceful crap. Here's what some other Vermonters - who live here and have just as much a claim on their Senator as the other recc'd diarist - have to say:
Thx for working with FDL to put pressure on Bernie to do what he, and perhaps he alone, can and should do: push back against the bill to the point of making it fail. For people who are represented by Conrad, Nelson or some other ultra-conservative Democrat it would be a bit of a stretch to expect anything more than we've seen: the sellout of Democratic values even before the negotiations started. But for those of us fortunate enough to be represented by Bernie, we have every reason to expect more.
I want to immigrate to Canada. I, too, wrote Bernie about the health bill, but he seems to be going to sign it anyway as the about the only attempt at reform that we shall see in this lifetime -- unless Vermont's move toward single-payer can sway the nation, or parts of it, to go along with it. if we can get the legislature to do this, Vermont will have to lead the way once again.
For instance, if tens of thousands of Vermonter's, through, say, their labor unions, were to come together and tell Bernie not to vote for the Senate Health Care Bill because it's worse for working Vermonter's than positive- well, Bernie would have a hard time voting for that Bill with a straight face, given how major a constituency to him labor is.
If thousands of Vermonters, through network of state environmental organizations and collations, were to launch a campaign to... well, you get my point.
If thousands of Vermonters demand it, neither Bernie nor Leahy nor Welch nor Douglas nor Shap on down will resist it.
Here's what some other smart people have to say about the right (and responsibility) to speak out and fight for what you believe in:
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. -Frederick Douglass
"Protest that endures...is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence."
- Wendell Berry
t is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.
- Albert Einstein
And just for kicks, here's a good comment about hero worship:
Unmixed praise is not due to any one. It leaves behind a sense of unreality. We can only do justice to a great man by a discriminating criticism. Hero-worship, which paints a faultless monster, whom the world never saw, is like those modern pictures which are a blaze of light without any shadow. - James Freeman Clarke
I don't know where this effort to stop the Senate bill which is consuming my days of late is going to end up. Personally, I feel my chance for victory is a long shot. I hope its the blogmob that will get to write all the "I told you so" diaries when everything works out magically and health care is all so much better in a few years. I suspect it won't go that way.
But this rabid, craven attacking of people like Hamsher - and after this diary, I'd imagine me, isn't just wrong or misguided - its downright pathological, and is - IMHO - a sign of a progressive movement that is very, very ill, and that maybe Rahm Emanuel was right not to take us seriously.
Happy holidays.