Wednesday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Not that he needs kudos from the likes of me, but today's honoree is Matt Taibbi, for accurately calling the health care debacle in Washington for what it is.

Money quote:

If the Obama administration wanted to pass a real health care bill, they would do what George Bush and Tom DeLay did in the first six-odd years of this decade whenever they wanted to pass some nightmare piece of legislation (ie the Prescription Drug Bill or CAFTA): they would take the recalcitrant legislators blocking their path into a back room at the Capitol, and beat them with rubber hoses until they changed their minds.

The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. There is insufficient political will to get it done. It doesn’t matter that it’s an urgent national calamity, that it is plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ over 8 that our system could not possibly be worse and needs to be fixed very soon, and that, moreover, the only people opposing a real reform bill are a pitifully small number of executives in the insurance industry who stand to lose the chance for a fifth summer house if this thing passes.

And those guys are who control our government. They always have.

So when Sarah Palin tells us to honor our troops who die for our country and our freedom (I guess the care packages and the fights for veterans benefits that we on the left side of the spectrum have been fighting for are chopped liver), we should ask ourselves just whose freedom she's talking about. Is it ours, or is it the right of insurance company executives to buy that fifth summer house.

I wonder if they pay for their household staffs' health care.