Monday, March 22, 2010

 

My This is Historic

The passage of the health care bill is so important that even Dana Milbank got serious for a day. In fact, his article is beautiful (I always liked Dana Milbank).

Also he manages to be almost completely balanced with just a trace of ballance (tm). He described how the Democrats were dignified and the Republicans loud mouthed rabble rousers. That's just what happened.

As for the trace of ballance he wrote (in the obligatory historic in spite of sentence)

Then came the town hall meetings, the death panels, the granny killing, the images of Nazi concentration camps, the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, Joe Wilson's "You lie!" moment, the middle-of-the-night and Christmas Eve votes, the Massachusetts special election, the Stupak Amendment, the Slaughter Plan, the filibusters, the supermajorities, the deeming and passing.

Note the Slaughter plan and "deeming and passing" are the same thing counted twice for ballance *and* that there was no actual deeming and passing. There was a regular vote on a regular bill which will be a regular law when it is signed by The President.

Also note that working hard because the minority is obstructionist ("middle-of-the-night and Christmas Eve votes") is presented as similar to debating by lying and by calling your opponents Nazis.

Finally the House voted to remove the Cornhusker kickback, although it is still in there unless and until the Senate passes the reconciliation side-car bill.

He just can't resist entirely for an whole article. but the closing is good.

"Hell, no, you can't!" Boehner shouted at the Democrats.

"No, you can't! No, you can't!" echoed the protesters outside.

But they could. And at 10:45 p.m., after 14 months of trying, 219 Democrats finally did.

I'm not sure the "finally" is appropriate in a news article, so an event in my personal history -- I just typed that Milbank may not have been balanced enough.

posted by Robert permalink and comments4:31 PM