Liberal groups unleash fire on behalf of America

Some in the mainstream press are finally taking proper and above-the-fold notice of the intensifying rift, in the primal grounds-for-divorce matter of overdue health-care reform, between organized liberalism and the disheveled Democratic Senate, even though, in its emphasis on a handful of liberal groups, the press improperly ignores the growing separation between Middle America and its elected representatives.

Nevertheless, what's there is a start, such as the Washington Post's story yesterday with the somewhat inverted headline, "Health-Care Activists Targeting Democrats: Sniping Among Liberals May Jeopardize Votes Needed to Pass Bill." As the story unfolds, we learn that it's liberals targeting backsliding Democrats, and, inferentially speaking, special-interest health-care activists of non-liberal stripes who are actually jeopardizing votes for a bill worth passing.

But let's overlook that inconvenient reality. For now, the key point is that "In recent days," as the Post tells us, "grass-roots organizations such as MoveOn.org, Health Care for America Now and the Service Employees International Union" have taken the virtuously dyspeptic lead in "singl[ing] out Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Ron Wyden, Arlen Specter and Dianne Feinstein for criticism more often reserved for opposition party members." (It appears he who wields the initially decisive gavel, Max Baucus, is being offered diplomatically tender treatment by these groups -- in my opinion ill-advised letters of marque, but, again, that's another story.)

Change-Congress.org is also in hot pursuit, primarily through Internet ads, such as the one in which it asks Web-surfing readers, "Will Mary Landrieu sell out Louisiana for $1.6 million?"

As the Post helpfully notes for the benefit of the pathologically clueless, the dollar figure is mentioned because "it suggests a link between contributions she has received from the medical industry and her reluctance to back the creation of a government-sponsored insurance option." (In relation to this, Fifth Columnist-reader Stan Fisher astutely notes in an email, "I cannot understand why a judge who has taken money from or has any connection to a corporation must recuse himself from hearing a case involving the corporation ... and yet Congress is allowed to write laws effecting corporations even after taking donations of millions." Now Mr. Fisher knows, as we all do, that Congress is able to write bribery-induced laws because it also writes the bribery-okaying laws which permit it to write the bribery-induced laws, but that, again, is yet another story.)

What was striking to me, however, were some of the quoted comments offered by these representatives of the people -- comments that can only be characterized as less than sensibly gentle, and even impudent, pushback.

For example in response to an SIEU press release in which Senator Feinstein was criticized for "put[ting] her foot on ... the brake" of comprehensive health-care reform, the California pol snapped, "I do not think this is helpful. It doesn't move me one whit." (How about $1.6 million? Would that "move" you?)

Or, there was Ron Wyden's disturbingly peculiar and shockingly frank observation on the selective influence of pluralism: "I get an election certificate from the people of Oregon," said Wyden, insufferably oblivious to the roughly three-fourths of Oregonians who have demanded a public option, and "As far as these ads are concerned, I pay them no attention." (How about $1.6 million? Would that get your "attention"?)

Yet even more distressing than striking was the contextually vacant, paraphrased part of a passage from the Post: "Adam Green, interim chief executive of Change Congress, ... was hard-pressed to articulate a substantive argument for the public plan but said that it 'has become a proxy for the question of Democrats who stand on principle and represent their constituents.' "

I'm at a loss. Is the Post saying that Mr. Green did not even attempt an argument? Or was he incoherent? Stammering? Drooling? The paper offers no explanation of its depiction of Green as "hard-pressed," nor does it say what constitutes a "substantive argument" for a public plan. Readers are, instead, left to surmise that Mr. Green is an idiot, and, it would follow, that a public option versus extended privatization -- the former being simpler in construction, cheaper in administrative costs, and of much greater leverage in containing expenditures -- is idiotic as well.

Whatever. Maybe Mr. Green flunked Debate in high school, or maybe he's intimidated by big-time reporters, or maybe he was having a really bad day, or maybe he did, in fact, "articulate a substantive argument for [a] public plan" and the Post simply pre-judged it as insufficient. We don't know any of that.

What we do know -- what anywhere from 75 percent to 85 percent of the American public knows -- is that a public plan makes public-policy sense, it's long overdue, and it indeed "has become a proxy for the question of Democrats who stand on principle and represent their constituents."