Tamping Down the Political Hysteria

The Right is up in arms over the health care reform bill (yawn), claiming that the deal making involved in passing the bill was unprecedented.

It's horse hockey, of course, like much of the hysteria on the Right.

Here's a helpful corrective from commentator Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post:

We are, or so we are told by conservative commentators and politicians, supposed to be indignant, outraged, horrified at the fact that lawmakers with bargaining power extracted special deals for their states in the negotiations over health care reform.

"Prostitution has been legalized in Washington, D.C.," railed Rush Limbaugh. "Backroom deals that amount to bribes," lamented South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Give me a break.

You may not like it. It's certainly not pretty. But this kind of political horse-trading has been around since the dawn of politics, if not the dawn of horses. So the protestations of fury from opponents of the measure are awfully hard to take.