From Dickens to Obermann: "With Growing Amazement and Multiplying Anger the True State of Our Healthcare"

For several months now, MSNBC's Keith Obermann has focused his journalistic eye with laser-like precision on the debates -- and more often, nonsense -- surrounding health care reform efforts, including and up to this week's ongoing debacle of a Senate bill. I have previously lifted up as essential to any thoughtful member of "The Left" (however self-designated membership within its roster may be) Obermann's commentatorial work. Some of my friends like to chide me by saying that Obermann is very often is too seduced by his own rhetoric and presumptive critical voice, citing as the most egregious example of such self-seduction his ongoing usage of Edward R. Murrow's (in)famous tag, "good night, and good luck." I make no recoil when hearing such an attempted rebuke; instead, I embrace it. We need more commentators with the journalistic integrity and social conscience of an Edward Murrow -- a list on which I would happily and proudly append the names of both Keith Obermann and Rachel Maddow.

What I find most powerful in Obermann's commentary on the (failed and failing) attempts at health care reform is the passion of his rhetoric: he speaks not only from the heart of an American social conscience, but most poingantly from the heart of one who has experienced and seen the worry and hurt and sorrow and pain of this country's health care system. It is for this reason that I wish to encourage everyone to listen to the hour-long "special comment" he offered back in October. His words are as vital to hear now as they were more than two months ago. There is so much I could say about his remarks: about how they left me nearly tearing up as they compelled me to recall what it was like four years ago dealing with the doctors at the bedside of my own dying brother. But such reflections must still wait, their rawness still too new even after so much time as passed and the extraordinary comfort of so many has been offered.

I think it's also appropriate for us to recall this comment now for two additional reasons: medievalists will not fail to hear Obermann putting to productive use an analogy with the English Courts of Chancery, and literary critics will not fail to attend to Obermann's powerful evocation of the Victorian era's social conscience, Charles Dickens, and his beloved (and today overly sentimentalized) novella A Christmas Carol, which was published on 19 December 1843.

Embedded below is only the first six minutes of Obermann's commentary. See here to watch the remaining parts, or here to stream the entire episode.

"Do NO Harm": Or, How Health Care Reform Has Been Perverted to Benefit the American Insurance Cartel

updated: 12/18/09 at 6pm CST

This will be my first attempt at imbeding videos, but I wanted to share Keith Obermann's December 16th, 2009, special comment on the perverted efforts at health care reform. I rally behind Obermann, who, along with Rachel Maddow, remain for me the single best, most thoughtful, most journalistically authentic, and rhetorically sensitive of commentators -- along with them being among the most compelling voices we now have on "The Left" (whatever such a construct can mean in an America always and seemingly forever suspicious of such a thing). Yes, I'm a proud Leftie!

Note also the brief posts on the "kill the bill" movement at Critical Animal and An und fur sich