Barney lives up to his name: He is frank!
August 19, 2009
Bravo to Representative Barney Frank for humiliating a shameless provocateur at his latest town hall meeting. His example should be a paradigm for all right thinking legislators.
The delightful irony is that it takes a gay man to teach the rest of us how to talk straight!
Health Care Reform and the Founders: Will Ignorance Defeat Responsible Compassion?
August 16, 2009
As the legislative vacation in Washington proceeds, the willingness of the Democratic Party, even through spokespersons for President Obama, to abandon the commitment to a public option in health care reform legislation seems to be growing.
This gutless retreat, this cowardly response, to the corrupt, mendacious, and insane rhetoric of the fringe of extremists of the right—together with its cohorts among Republic party legislators (and so-called “blue dog” Democratic party legislators) in Washington—would represent the success of a “swiftboating” of health care reform that would not augur well for the future of the President’s promised agenda. Indeed, such success—the success of what I have called fRight—would be likely to torpedo anything of substance that the President tries to do for the rest of his first term, which could disappointingly turn into his only term, in the highest office of the land.
If genuine health care reform (with a public option) is sacrificed on the altar of expediency, the electoral danger to the Democratic party is not that its voters will vote for another party in forthcoming elections, but rather that they will not vote at all.
When George W. Bush completed his tenure as president, I said that our country had nowhere to go but up. I may have been wrong. If the Democratic legislators cannot pass health care reform legislation that contains a strong public option, it will turn out that our country simply had nowhere to go, so it stayed where it was.
If the promise of our new president turns out to be empty in this way, we will discover to our shame that the assassination of a president does not require a gun, but only requires loud enough liars abetted by those who are too frightened to call their lies “lies” and too timid to vote their consciences.
The Founders believed that the virtue of republican government was that through the agency of its legislators conscience would always trump constituency and the correct majority of one would always trump the demagogically deceived majority of millions. The Founders believed that the policy of the informed electors (from whom our legislators would presumably be drawn) would prevail over the passions of the uninformed electors. In recent decades, we have been betraying that belief.
If the stentorian voices of the ignoramuses drown out the reasoned voices of the informed, not only will we be forced to accept the failure to achieve meaningful health care reform, but also we will be forced to recognize that the failure to reform education in this country may be the biggest failure of all.
