Forget about bipartisanship (Gene Lyons)

President Obama was elected with perhaps the best chance in a generation to reform America's unjust and grotesquely inefficient health care system.

To do so, however, he'll have to conquer not only entrenched special interests like the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and the American Medical Association, but his own sentimental rhetoric about bipartisanship.

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http://moose-and-squirrel.com/gene/gene.html

This is not a game. It is not an olive branch moment.
This is about who lives and dies in America.

It is entirely one sided. I think he needs to deal with the political reality of what the republican agenda really is. It damn sure isn't bipartisanship. I don't think it even makes the list of their priorities.

Why is there all this talk of bipartisanship with the GOP, who clearly didn't give a damn about Democratic ideas when they were in charge? They wouldn't let even one Democrat into the reconciliation meetings, which is where the law is really made. Why is it they only needed 51 votes to pass a bill in the Senate and we need 60? Did someone change the Constitution while I was out walking the dog?

Why are we even talking to them? All they want to do is "Norm Coleman" the medical reform movement -- delay as long as possible, then delay some more. For every minute we let them talk we are wasting one of ours. For every GOP "talking point" we respond to as if it had validity we lose ground because we're not putting forth our own ideas. They are trying to run out the clock.

Make them hold their make-believe "hearings" in the basement!

This is like the losing team insisting they be allowed to have their own float in the winners' victory parade -- and then letting them put it at the head of the parade!

when he had the majority in Congress and tried to "ram" things through and the subsequent loss of a majority in Congress.

we should be locking them up or kicking them out of our country! This bunch has no place in American Society.