I’VE BEEN HAMMERED

Readers rake me over the coals!
by Charlie Leck

I wish many of my readers would open commenting accounts with Google. It’s easy and doesn’t cost anything and then, when you don’t like something I write, or you do, you can make public comments on my post – rather than emailing comments only to me.

Whatever!

Several dozen of you toasted me for my rather harsh comments about President Obama’s failures on moving his original health care reform concepts through the Congress. One went so far as to call me a racist.

Whatever!

A woman from North Carolina wrote to tell me I “swung the axe on Obama too prematurely!” She’s confident Obama will find a way to again include a public option in his health care proposal. Well, this woman may be correct, but it will be no thanks to Obama. Howard Dean and other insightful Democrats may need to be credited for that. They came down hard on Obama after his far too compromising comments and Obama is reacting to their wrath.

A reader in Colorado scolded me with several email. Here’s one of them:

“maybe you're right...i hope not...i don't question your passion...i question your haste... a lot of people respect your opinion...i'm one of them... i, too, am unwilling to accept watered-down health care reform...i'd rather have none at all, for now... but, i consider this an obama failure, that's all...i didn't think of him as the messiah, so i don't feel betrayed...i guess that my attitude could, and probably will change...i'm just not ready to go there yet...“and again, i wish you'd give it, and him, a little more time before getting off the train...”

A reader extremely close to me wrote harshly: “Stop it already! Give him a chance!”

One of my own family wrote that I was being too unfair and too unforgiving. “You made me really angry – not at Obama either!”

Whatever!

A California reader wrote only a few words: “I know he can!”

It was a Mississippi reader who wrote: “I thought you were on our side. If this had been a white President, you wouldn’t have jumped off the band wagon so quickly!” I’d prefer not to comment on that one except to say: “I don’t know!”

There were also a number of people who wrote agreeing, but, unfortunately, many of them were my Republican friends who took great delight in my defection. They simply don’t understand the issues involved here. To me, Obama is acting too Republican and is too concerned about bi-partisanship and not about passing a much needed and much overdue piece of legislation.

Whatever! I won’t go on and on with these comments. I only beg you to be gutsy enough to put them out there in the public for other readers to examine. Nevertheless, thanks for all the emails.

In the meantime, I recommend you read this article from The Nation Magazine by William Greider: Is Obama Squandering Our Best Chance for Better Health Care?

Of course, my answer to that question in my last blog was “yes.” Read Greider and see what he says.