Look, I appreciate that people are disillusioned (or not) or weary (or not) or surprised (or not) or angry (or not) for any of a variety of reasons by the behavior of our president and our party. I've expressed such emotions myself in recent days.
But I'd really like to see the debate turn from what appears to be a post-mortem on the failure of health care reform to addressing the fact that there is a bill not yet passed that may (or may not) screw over pretty much everybody (who isn't Joe Lieberman or an insurance company executive).
Personally, I am with Dean: Kill the Bill. Or at least the Senate version. But for the moment the Senate bill is not the fat lady singing.
I am not so sure the House version is entirely out of the picture, that we can not, in some way, somehow, get this fiasco into reconciliation and find something worthy of salvaging.
Or maybe not. Heh. I'm not dumb, and have seen the wind blowing rightward since, oh, the election.
I started today wondering out loud to my daughter how Lieberman is going to one-up Nelson, considering Nelson wasn't content with upstaging Lieberman merely by proposing that this legislation offers an historic opportunity to control my body, but then laying out a laundry list of reasons why he opposes it. Surely Lieberman is not going to take Nelson's actions lying down? Perhaps he will now insist that we scrap the whole damned idea and just write a huge check to private insurers or lose his vote on this. So, yeah, such is the state of my cynicism these days.
But what is distressing me at this point in the day is that we seem to be spending so much time debating who is to blame for the failure of meaningful reform that we are missing the fact that the polls have not closed in Congress.
There is not yet a vote. So can we defer the debate over who was to blame until we are sure what to blame them for?
Because I've worked for hopeless campaigns before, and know damned well we can't stop working the phones and e-mails and such until the polls are closed.