More food for thought

[judiang]

Last night on AIM, I was livid at the rumors that the White House was expected to back away from a public option on the health care debate. I lamented how MSM was catering to the extreme right and allowing the debate to be hijacked by paranoid apocalyptic people who essentially couldn't stand it that a black man was president. It was remarked

Comments

[elsaf]

When they impeached Clinton, they knew from the beginning they didn't have the votes to convict him. It was just a strategy to completely derail his agenda (which is the same thing that's going on now with Obama).

I will agree it's nastier now, out on the street. And the reason is that many white conservatives are livid that a black man is president.

But the fact remains that Obama won a decisive victory in the election. He's still popular with the average American (60 percent approval rating) -- white, black and otherwise. The people who have been making the noise are a minority, whose vitriol has been magnified by their fear that they're losing control of the country. (News flash, you LOST control of the country -- thank goodness.)

Health care was always going to be a hard slog, and race isn't really the reason. (The intensity of the attacks on the president is undoubtedly affected by race, but not specifically the opposition to health care.)

The real bottom line here is MONEY. Insurance is a huge money cow. So big that our government thought it had to bail out AIG because the failure of so large a financial entity would have destroyed the economy.

Real health care reform will cut off the money spigot for a lot of very greedy insurance executives. So, they're going to use any means they can think of to kill the plan.

So, they're stirring up the racial stuff, just to use it to block health care.

Going back to Clinton, his popularity rose while he was being impeached, because the average American could see that the charges were trivial and the whole thing was being blown out of proportion for political purposes.

Don't count Obama out. He's fighting back pretty effectively now, and this is just the kind of fight he excels at. I think a lot of people are coming around as they see just how insane the attacks are getting.

The health care fight isn't over. In fact, it's just beginning. There's a House bill, there will be a Senate bill (after the break), but where the REAL bill emerges will be the conference committee. That's when we'll find out if there will be real reform, or just lip service and a new windfall for the insurance industry.

[judiang]

I hear what you're saying. The bottom line to the insurance companies is money. But not to the hysterical paranoids at the town hall meetings with their mob mentality attempting to be the final arbiters of truth, justice and the American way. Yes, the bill will be ironed out later by rational minds. But other rational minds should state in the media, in the House, in the Senate, everywhere, that this behavior is unacceptable. They cannot go unchecked. IMHO, it would be a big mistake to ignore them as just marginalized kooks. Their latest brilliant idea is to bring guns and rifles to public gatherings where the President's venue is nearby and it's all legal. Dangerous? Pretty much.