Legal Commentary

"Progressives" In The Village

By Big Tent Democrat

I very much appreciate Kevin Drum but this post and this post really can not be reconciled. Kevin writes:

[T]he reform bill we ended up with is very similar to both the 1993 Republican counterproposal to Clintoncare and to Mitt Romney's healthcare plan for Massachusetts.

Just below that post, he wrote:

Glenn Greenwald commends to us Jeremy Scahill's take on healthcare reform:

[I]f you look on the liberal blogosphere, people like Jane Hamsher are attacked mercilessly for having the audacity to stand up and say "this is a Democratic sellout."

I've got nothing but props for Scahill's work, but this is just wrong. [. . . M]ost of us who supported the current healthcare bill — warts and all — did so because it was, plainly, not only an enormous first step1 forward, but the only way to make that first step.

Scahill and Greenwald's point is not about supporting the legislation - it is about pretending the legislation was the greatest progressive triumph since Medicare. Drum (and every other Village blogger) says the legislation is conservative reform in his next post. And yet he and they also say this is a progressive triumph. It isn't. Maybe it will evolve into one, as Drum predicts in this piece. But the ACTUAL legislation is, IN THEIR WORDS, conservative reform. And people have been attacked for saying so.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 26, 2010 (boomark / email).