If anyone was confused on what the public option is, they got a clear concise explanation last night! President Obama said the public option is only a sliver of the whole entire bill. Is that good enough for the Obama Haters (birthers, deathers, republicans, Blue Dogs, liberal retards)? Nope! They will never be satisfied. We need to stop listening to the assholes and put something through THAT CAN BE WORKED ON OVER THE NEXT 4 YEARS BEFORE IMPLEMENTATION.

Gees.

Kos said it fairly eloquently; this is sort of our Waterloo (although that’s ominous phrasing… are we Napoleon, then? hope not…) We drew a line in the sand, and we’ve spent a ton of money and energy to get congresscritters to commit to voting against a bill without the public option.

Now, Obama’s speechified again (and nobody doubts he can make a STUNNING speech; I was fooled for a few minutes myself until I thought about it) and the pundits will be all electrified. Between that and the screaming Republican, almost all of the spotlight will be off the progressives for a little bit; they’ll assume that we’re whipped. They’ll assume that we’ll just roll.

So that’s the question: will we? Will we risk going against Obama’s newly re-popular plan and being seen as the folks who Nadered it in 2009? We know it’s a heap of dung, but the rest of the country doesn’t know that yet, and we’re for sure being set up to be the fall guys here.

So again — will we stick to our resolutions? We can sigh in disappointment that Obama is clearly not one of us — not that most of us really thought he was, not since FISA — and yet still keep pressing forward with our agenda. We can try to be the irritating little grain of sand that grows a pearl.

Or we can cave, call it a good game, and go home. We can fracture — split into warring factions calling each other names, claiming that Hillary wouldn’t have done this. We can lose our momentum and toss all those ActBlue dollars in the wastebin.

Which will it be?

Jane? Markos? Digby? Progressive blogosphere? We’re gonna need some leadership here to keep from fracturing; if we’re gonna stick to our guns, we’re going to need some marching orders (as horrible and sheep-like as that sounds, it’s true; it’s ESPECIALLY true of the progressive movement that is just finding its voice as separate from the corrupt Democratic party; Obama isn’t our leader, so who will be?)