Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

It's embarrassing to watch you/this site jump on the bandwagon to the 'tear Obama down' bonfire. Wow! High expectations lead to disappointment?! Breaking news, dude.

You know what hasn't changed? You and the rest of your professional class – seeking stories to feed the beast on a twitter schedule. As for healthcare, there are no "setbacks" when drafting legislation and running through committee because it's a negotiation, but the media blasted those words out hundreds of times a day, while using the word "progress" just a fraction of the time. I guess that means it's true, right?

Watching CNN and countless other "mainstream" news sources display blatant anti-healthcare reform bias has been like a punch in the gut. Where are the journalists decrying the "rationing" of healthcare by income? Where is the Cronkite of our time who calls hypocritical politicians on the carpet to denounce "socialist roads, socialist police forces, socialist mail delivery" and so on? What about the Republicans who are wholesale abandoning their responsibility over this "socialist" experiment, when everyone knows that they'll vote for corn, oil and corporate subsidies as reliably as an atomic clock? I think the Obama administration and Congress are doing what needs to be done, and the media establishment's response just proves that if they hadn't set the deadlines and led [as they have], the decades-long "setback" of healthcare reform would continue.

But wait, you're right! Nothing has changed because the extreme minority of Americans who are gay and chose to serve in the military can't go out on date. Oh the humanity! Like it or not, that's how your site reads these days: small and snarky.

My main concern is with the looming fiscal collapse. But I have every reason to believe that Obama will indeed get near-universal healthcare in his first year in office, and that it will be as modest in its current scope and architectonic in its longer-term impact as his climate change law. But I am not a cheer-leader and I don't think Obama wants cheer-leaders. He wants and deserves criticism when merited.