Dear Dennis Kucinich,
You know as well as any one else that this current bill will save millions and that your voting against it will kill millions. Do not slit the throat of health care reform with your pen, when your pen can sign us into a bright future!
Reform has survived the winter of its discontent and yet you would still stab it and send countless children to their deaths? Please sir, read up on your Shakespeare and remember Brutus who killed his friend Caesar out of an obsession with political perfection. Like Brutus, your obsession with perfection has made you the enemy of all that is good and made you allies with power-crazed politicians on the right. There is another way and you know it, sir!
You and I both know that like the first incarnations of Social Security, Civil Rights, and Medicare, this bill will lay the groundwork for the kind of health care that we wish to see in the future. As peacemakers, we both know that change happens on a continuum that requires patience and compromise. But if you decide to kill health care, then we need only change a few of the words in Mark Antony's eulogy for Caesar and allow history to remember you as THE modern day Brutus against health care reform. And so, with apologies to William Shakespeare, I present to you the speech that must be made if you decide to betray our nation and your fellow humanity by betraying health care reform. It is a speech that I hope will never need to be delivered:
Friends, Liberals, Republicans, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Health Care, not to praise it;
The evil that Bills do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Health Care.
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
Look, in this place ran Jim DeMint's dagger through:
See what a rent the idealistic Dennis made:
Through this the well-beloved Dennis stabb'd;
And as he pluck'd his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of Health Care follow'd it,
As rushing out of doors, to be resolved
If Dennis so unkindly knock'd, or no;
For Dennis, as you know, was Health Care's angel:
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Health Care loved him!
This was the most unkindest cut of all;
For when the noble Health Care saw him stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms,
Quite vanquish'd him: then burst it's mighty heart;
All over the House it ran blood, as great Health Care fell.
O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down,
Whilst bloody treason flourish'd over us.
I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts:
I am no orator, as Dennis is;
But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men's blood: I only speak right on;
I tell you that which you yourselves do know;
And here is the will, and under Health Care's seal:
To every US citizen it gives,
To every several man, Real, Moral Security.
Moreover, it hath left you all medicine,
Universal Care and less bureaucracy,
No pre-existing conditions to bar you
And to your heirs for ever, common pleasures,
To walk abroad, and recreate yourselves.
Here was a Health Bill! when comes such another?!
Dennis, I'll tell you when another bill for health care reform will come: only after two decades, a shattered economy, and millions of innocent people are dead thanks to your vote. Please do not be a Brutus. Be an Antony. Stand up for what is right. Vote yes.