With all of the hubbub about Joe Lieberman providing cover (and a stock boost) for his patricians in the health care industry, I began to wonder about something that I haven't heard from ANYONE discussing health care on any major channel (or even on the net really). I've seen some really wonderful Democratic Congressmen and women and Senators discussing the issue of health care reform eloquently and forcefully of late. Representatives Anthony Weiner and Alan Grayson have been particularly fantastic and Senator Sherrod Brown has been equally wonderful. I haven't heard any of them discuss an issue that I feel should be discussed at length though (although it's rather ancillary to health care reform but, still important).
Hypocrisy, thy name is Republican.
Follow me below the fold to take a trip back to 2005 and discover just wtf I'm talking about.
Remember the early part of 2005? The Republicans were all up in arms because the Democratic minority had refused to allow several of George W Bush's judicial nominees to come to the floor of the Senate for an "up or down vote". Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist came up with a way for the Republican majority to overcome these judicial filibusters. It was called "the Nuclear Option". Under Senate Rule 22, there are strict provisions for invoking cloture (and ending debate) on a bill up for a vote. The Nuclear Option would throw all of those rules out the window and make it impossible to filibuster any bill or nominee in the Senate. This would have destroyed comity in the Senate and, in effect, destroyed the operations of the Senate, thus the scary, apocalyptic name.
Virtually every single Republican currently threatening a filibuster of health care reform (which is, basically, all of them) supported Bill Frist in his proposal of the nuclear option. Why on Earth do the Representatives and Senators on our side of the aisle seemingly lack the ability to call the Republicans out on their hypocrisy?
Let's break this down into something that even the sycophants laboring on the right-wing side of the aisle can understand: to quote someone I respect greatly (even though this quote was horribly misconstrued in its original iteration): "I was for it before I was against it". In this case it may be more appropriate to paraphrase slightly and say that they were against it (filibustering) before they were for it.
Regardless, it's time for the Democrats to start calling these asshats (including the alleged Democrats that call themselves blue dogs) out on their hypocrisy. Perhaps if the American people had a greater attention span we could quit making mistakes that we've already made like, for instance, trusting Joe Lieberman to do anything but screw us in an uncomfortable place (and, no, I don't mean the back of a Volkswagen).