Over at Daily Kos, bloggers aren't merely mourning Ted Kennedy's death. Some are declaring that this moment is the time for health "reform," and the only obstacle is Republicans who killed New Orleans and laughed about it. The blogger "cskendrick" declared on Wednesday:
The acrimony surrounding health care reform is not the litmus test of our Republic. This test we took not so long ago - and we failed this test utterly.
How did we fail? We let the Republicans kill a major U.S. city. We let them laugh about it and walk away. We all failed New Orleans. We failed its rights, its lives, its health, its rightful place in our compassion. I was resistant to the message not so long ago but it is true - We. All. Failed. NOLA. The Republicans failed it gladly and boldly. The Democrats failed to take them to task for this abomination.
The Republican [sic] THINK they know how far they can push us now. When you wonder how far the right will push you before you break on health care, remember that they killed a major American city, a Democratic city, right before your very eyes - and you did nothing. Oh, surely you donated, surely you volunteered, surely you did all the proper activist and progressive things. But you did not fight. You did call on champions or if you did, they failed you. And you did not seek replacements when your brethren on the Gulf Coast needed them most. But you did not really fail them. You failed yourselves. And the Republicans saw, and looked down their shirts, and hid their smiles. [Bold emphasis is the blogger's.]
It's precisely this kind of assuming the worst about your adversary's intentions that defines the Daily Kos. It's not enough that your adversary's aims are not in the national interest. Your adversary actually has a not-so-secret agenda of death and destruction. It's like a mudslinging campaign ad that never ends, like the hilarious "Mario Cuomo was involved in a chainsaw massacre" ad on Saturday Night Live.
Only these people aren't joking.
The failure to pass a nationalizing of health care is causing "great harm" to the American people, a deadly harm:
Stop treating affordable national healthcare like it was leprosy. Get. It. Done.
So long as no progress has been made in this matter, Congress is complicit in causing great harm to the American people, for negligence can be just as deadly as incompetence and malicious intent.
Malicious intent is certainly something that Daily Kos is good at imagining.
[Hat tip: Tucson Tom]
