Spineless, Spiteful Joe Lieberman on how to Bite the Hand that Feeds You

Jon Cohn who, along with Ezra Klein, has been my health care go-to journalist has an excellent post describing why Joe Lieberman is acting selfishly. And it's a crying shame that a U.S. Senator - who seemingly believes in health care reform - would blatantly lie and draw an ever-moving line in the sand simply to annoy the real Democrats who have reached out to him.

there’s no evidence Lieberman believes any of these arguments against reform, and a great deal of evidence that he does not. Lieberman, by all appearances, seems to share the belief of essentially all Democrats and many non-Democrats that health care reform is a moral imperative. And his discomfort with a modest Medicare buy-in seems altogether contrived, given that he endorsed the idea of a Medicare buy-in during the 2000 presidential campaign and defended it as recently as three months ago.

To put it bluntly, the idea that Lieberman now finds the very same proposal a grave threat to the public good is simply not credible. And while I understand the rules of strategic gamesmanship, somebody who took health care reform seriously--somebody who genuinely cared about ending the misfortune that visits people without affordable medical care--simply would not have made such a strong stand, over such a tiny issue, at such a pivotal time.

The proof, I think, is in the actions of Lieberman’s adversaries. Sherrod Brown supports the public option just as passionately as Lieberman opposes it. The same goes for Jay Rockefeller. But Brown and Rockefeller have already made a series of huge concessions, because those concessions were necessary to move a bill through Congress. Last night, both men signaled they were prepared to make one last concession--to give up on the idea of a public plan altogether--because that’s what it will take to pass the law.

Brown and Rockefeller, in other words, acted to promote the greater good. I can believe some of their adversaries are doing the same. I find it hard to believe Lieberman is among them.