Should We Kill the Health Care Bill? (Please Don't Expect Me to Have an Answer)

There's currently a big debate in liberal circles about whether the health care reform bill, as it currently stands, is even worth passing at all. And, I'll tell you, it's the absolute worst kind of political debate: a complex one that requires thinking and nuanced reason. (Ugh! Don't you hate those? They're the worst. Please, somebody, just tell me who the Nazi is.)

On the one side, there's a bunch of people like Josh Marshall and Matt Yglesias who think that it's better to pass a severely hobbled reform bill that will do some good to some people.

And on the other side, there are the people, like Howard Dean and Markos Moulitsas, who just want the bill dead. They want its family dead. They want its house burnt to the ground, so they can go there in the middle of the night and piss on its ashes. However — unlike the Teabaggers who oppose this bill because Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim atheist communist terrorist Hitler bring back the America I love fuuuuuuuuuuuuucccckkkkkkkkk Glenn Beck is teh awesome!!!! — these people have actual reasons and a passing understanding of logic.

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Setting Back the Cause of Heckling by Decades

Matt Yglesias on Joe Wilson's contribution to last night's festivities…

Personally, I sort of liked Rep Joe Wilson’s idea of introducing British-style heckling to the halls of congress; totally disrespectful and out of step with American tradition, true, but their tradition is better. Unfortunately, Wilson was also lying about the point at issue and will thereby set back the cause of heckling by decades.

I see his point, but I'd just as soon keep our quaint little no screaming bullshit in the middle of important speeches rule and take some of Britain's vernacular.

Like "lift" for "elevator," "flat" for "apartment" and "football" for "terribly boring thing that nobody actually enjoys." It just makes you sound classier.