More Hypocrisy from 'Hammering' Jane Hamsher

Hey, I'm pleased folks are ripping into "Hammering" Jane Hamsher. As I've said all along, she's the most despised hypocrite on the netroots left (and that's saying a lot). Everybody hates her, conservatives and radicals.

Tommy Christopher has a sweet post highlighting even more of Hammering Hamsher's rank hypocrisy, pointing to this MSNBC segment from last summer, when Hamsher appeared across from Jillian Bandes:

This is the real problem with Hamsher’s Fox appearance. She’s dishonestly using the PHrMA deal as a smokescreen to whatever her real objection is. When Jillian Bandes pointed out this deal with the devil, Hamsher had nothing to say about it.

Nobody likes the PHrMA deal (except pharmaceutical companies), but most supporters of reform have been willing to hold their noses and accept it as the price of getting a good bill. To wave it around at this late date is disingenuous at best (as is much of her opposition to the bill). Hamsher was throwing red meat to Fox’s audience instead of focusing on her real problem with the bill.

I don’t know what that is for sure, but I suspect it has something to do with this statement, from the Fox & Friends appearance:

“If you’ve got insurance right now through your employer that you like, this bill taxes the benefits, middle class benefits, and actually causes it to be worse, to cut back on benefits, and to be more expensive copays, that’s how they bend the cost curve is by making sure that you use less services.”

This is all true, and an excellent point, but neither Hamsher nor Doocy bothers to ask the question that David Shuster asked in that clip from July: What about the tens of millions of people who have no insurance, good or otherwise?

Jane Hamsher loves to remind people that she survived cancer (three times), even calling it “offensive” for someone to argue with her because of it. What she seems to have forgotten is that, for all the trouble she had with her insurance company, she had insurance. She’s urging people to kill a bill that will cover tens of millions of people who don’t have insurance now (rather than urging a strong push to improve the bill in conference), while she is living proof that having insurance can be the difference between life and death. Now, that’s offensive.

I hate when people do this, but since Jane opened the door, I have to say this. My dad dropped dead of a heart attack at age 58, without health insurance. If he had had health insurance, he’d probably still be alive today. Does that make me right about health care reform? No. This thing should be argued on the merits. I think most people would agree that we need an America in which both Jane and my dad get to survive.

RTWT. Hat Tip: The Rheotorican.

Plus, Robert Stacy McCain at the American Spectator, "Second Thoughts for Jane Hamsher?"