Healthcare passes!

Holy shit. I never thought it would, to be honest. And when Scott Brown won Teddy's old seat, I thought we were sunk. Have to give credit to Obama and to Pelosi and Reed for pushing this through. Is it perfect? Hell no. But it is a damn start. I am reminded that Social Security originally left out most African Americans. We fixed that. We will have to fix parts of this, I am sure. That is the nature of democracy. As I noted to SOF, however, imagine what it would have taken to get a stronger bill. This one barely passed. And it passed with all sorts of Republican misinformation thrown in. There are legitimate concerns about this bill, but Republicans chose to go the "totalitarian" or "socialist" route.

As Adam Serwer notes, our opposition is unhinged:

"the conservatism of today, which sees liberalism as a force to be annihilated and liberals as traitors if it sees them as Americans at all. It expresses itself in apocalyptic rhetoric that teeters on the precipice of endorsing violence as a political tool. Where the Obama liberals of today internalized the conservative critiques of liberalism in the aftermath of their defeats, conservatives concluded in the aftermath of theirs that liberalism has nothing to teach them, even to the point of rejecting the functionally bipartisan civil rights reforms that extended basic rights to all Americans in the 1960s. These are the circumstances of the present. Where conservatives go now, after having portrayed Obama as the second coming of Stalin and health care reform as the beginning of totalitarianism I do not know--particularly since the conservative soul searching of recent years has only led them farther to the right."

I will take this victory for what it is. A good one in the face of a nihilistic right. But in many ways, just the beginning of the work we have to do.