When contemplating American politics today, it’s hard not to think of Yeats’s line from the Second Coming:

”The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

In the health care reform legislative process, the progressives held true to the slogan that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and they forgot the maxim that “if you stand for nothing, you’ll end up with nothing.” So, here we are with worse than nothing, with two immoral bills, that do more harm than good, and with every prospect that an equally bad compromise between them will be presented to both Houses for final ratification.

That immoral compromise needs to be defeated. Health Care Reform must be sent back to the Leadership for further work. If Congress is not immediately ready for true health care reform ending the fatalities, bankruptcies and foreclosures within a years’ implementation time, then, at least, a bill must be passed that ends rescissions, denials of coverage or price discrimination based on preconditions, and that limits insurance premium increases to the annual rate of inflation, effective immediately.

Bernie Sanders’ appearance on The Ed Show, was a sad one for me to see, because he tried to explain his joining the Democrats in voting for cloture on the Senate’s health care reform bill in two ways. First, of course, he waxes enthusiastic about the tremendous good that the measly $10 billion (about 0.1 of one percent of total expenditures under the bill) he secured for funding community health centers would do for the uninsured, clearly implying that it would have a substantial effect on the 45,000 annual fatalities we now see. But second, then he moves right to the false Democratic Party talking points we’ve been seeing from so many Party functionaries this week, and even much earlier in relation to supporting the stronger, but still pathetic House bill.

Here are nine reasons the Senate health care reform bill should be killed:

1) The bill gives almost no real help ’til 2014. In the short term, the bill does nothing about the fatalities, bankruptcies, and foreclosures that come from lack of insurance. Therefore, the very title of the bill — “The Affordable Health Choices Act” –is a lie, despite band-aids for children and young adults, because the bill doesn’t get people care in the short run at an affordable price that will protect them from financial ruin.

This is an appeal to all Progressive Senators, whom I, perhaps mistakenly, list as including: Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Russ Feingold, Pat Leahy, Al Franken, Sheldon Whitehouse, Tom Harkin, Ron Wyden, Patty Murray, Dick Durbin, Barbra Boxer, Byron Dorgan, Barbara Mikulski, Ben Cardin, Jay Rockefeller, Chuck Schumer, and Paul Kirk. My apologies to Amy Klobuchar, Maria Cantwell, Carl Levin, Debbie Stabenow, Michael Bennett, Jon Tester, John Kerry, and Jack Reed, if I’ve done one or more of you an injustice by not including you in this first list. And if I have, I wish you’d consider this post as an appeal to you too.

Briefly, I appeal to each of you to tell Harry Reid that you will vote “no” on any Senate health care reform bill that has individual mandates without a public option, or a Medicare buy-in option for people under 65, lifetime limits on insurance coverage, doesn’t outlaw: denials of coverage based on preconditions, rescissions, and price discrimination based on previous illness, or preconditions, or socio-economic grouping, doesn’t require medical loss ratios of 90% or more, and doesn’t take full effect by early fall of 2010.

Apart from whether the President gets hurt politically, and even whether the real interests of the people in the area of HCR are served, there is the larger issue of restoring the Congress and the Senate as institutions. Today, the Senate needs a group of progressives like the liberal Senators of the ’50s and ’60s. It needs people who have the courage of their convictions, and who can negotiate successfully for what they believe in. But the problem is that jello progressives, like Jello Jay can’t do that. The reason is basic to the process of successful negotiation. In any such process, you have to be prepared to walk away from the table to get anything good at all. You have to be able to say “no.” When you lose something in negotiation, you have to be able to deny your negotiating partner something. You have to make that partner pay a price for the concession they denied to you. Jello Jay and his jello progressive colleagues can’t do that. They can’t say no. Until they can, every other party to the negotiations they take part in will roll them. It’s as simple as that. The old liberals were prepared to walk away. But Jello Progressivism says “yes,” no matter how much it loses in negotiation. Jello progressives are so afraid of failure that they always fail, even while they tell themselves they’ve accomplished something. That has to stop, or these progressives have to be replaced, because as things are now they are neither any good to us, nor to themselves.