A Lesson For Our Firebagger Friends

CNN's Wolf Blitzer accidentally tells fellow CNN anchor Rick Sanchez the truth about the opposition to health care reform.

But if you take a closer look at people who didn't like it, about 12% of those people who said they didn't like it they didn't like it because they didn't think it went far enough. They wanted a single payer option, they wanted the so-called public option, they didn't like not from the right, they didn't like it because it wasn't left or liberal enough.

That's how you got 50% of the American people who said, "we don't like this plan." But only about 40 or 38% were the ones who said it was too much government interference.

Holy crap, you'd think there's a story there.  You'd think the "overwhelming bipartisan opposition" lie they've been pushing could have been disproven months ago if anyone had bothered asking people why they opposed it. Digby:

All we've been hearing for months now is that the "American people" don't like the bill because it's a government takeover. The Republicans turned that into their entire rationale for opposition, claiming that the Democrats are going against "the will of the people" and somehow usurped the Democratic process. And here it turns out that it's only the Republicans and a few conservative "independents", 38% or so of the country, who think the bill is a government takeover.

That's quite a different story don't you think? One that might have been told before now by the news networks? It might have changed the whole damned debate, actually.

Blitzer admits that they just "assumed" that everyone in the country held this wingnut view. After all, the pictures showed a bunch of angry middle aged white people screaming about socialism, and they look like their perception of Real America, so why bother to drill down into the numbers any further?

This is a perfect example of the village advancing its narrative of a great conservative majority that doesn't exist. It's a pathology with these people.

Only now that the bill has passed anyway, and our Village Idiots are scrambling to see why the Dems actually developed spinal fortitude on this one (the Villagers have to have some sort of an answer or they lose credibility) when they looked, lo and behold, there's one in eight playing firebagger from the left.

This goes to show you two things:

One, the Village is lazy.  Poll analysis is serious bidness.

Two, the firebaggers shot themselves in their own foot and were played for fools, entirely used as opposition to ANY health care reform by the right (just as predicted.)  Despite their best efforts, they didn't manage to completely f'cking sink the bill.  They came perilously close to doing so.  And I wonder how much better the bill would have been if they had supported the effort all the way through instead of "principled opposition" that almost got us Not A Damn Thing.  If the Dems had seen the polls showing that people were behind this effort, they would have wanted to improve it more.  Instead, because the firebaggers showed up as opposition to the ENTIRE HEALTH CARE REFORM EFFORT, the Dems repeatedly scaled the bill BACK.

I've said for a while now we need a better Washington pundit class.  But damn, we need a better far left pundit class too.