Once again, the inestimable Bill Moyers displays how a real journalist should act:

The Democratic Party has become like the Republican Party-- deeply influenced by corporate money. I think Rahm Emanuel, who's a clever politician, understands that the money for Obama's re-election will come primarily from the health industry, the drug industry and Wall Street. He is a corporate Democrat who is determined that there won't be something in this legislation-- if we get it-- that will turn off those powerful interests.

 

[...]

 

 There’s this fear that Barack Obama will become the Grover Cleveland of this era – Grover Cleveland was a good man, but he became a conservative Democratic President because he didn’t fight the powerful interests – people say Obama should be FDR – I’d much rather see him be Theodore Roosevelt --– Teddy Roosevelt loved to fight – … I think if Obama fought instead of really finessed it so much . . . I think it would change the atmosphere.

Watch the video.

As we survey the grim fact that -- despite big majorities in both houses of Congress, a popular and charismatic president, and solid public approval -- we may very well not get the kind of health care changes that befit a civilized nation, it's hard not to sink into a profound cynicism. We have never had an opportunity this good, and who knows when another one will come along. Money wins the day, forever and ever, amen.

-A

H/T Digby

White people, of course, having never experienced the business end of institutionalized racism, can only achieve an approximate understanding of it. Fortunately, Tim Wise is on the scene to help. Here's Wise on how racism is driving the opposition to health care.

"You know full well that no one is talking about wanting to go back to the days of segregation."

Well, no, I don't know it. I don't know that at all, seeing as how so many of the tea-bag set and anti-health care folks make "taking their country back" one of the most prominent lines of their vocalized outrage. What does that mean, coming from people in their 60s and 70s, for whom the America of their youth was indeed a white supremacist place? A place where white hegemony could be taken as a given, something that could be presumed in perpetuity? What does it mean when someone says that they want to go back to the country the way the founders envisioned it, as many have also explained at these rallies? After all, they envisioned a white republic. They envisioned and sought out the extirpation of indigenous peoples, most believed in the enslavement of African peoples, and none truly believed that blacks should be treated as equals.

-A