Let's call their bluff.

There's a lot of willful confusion over a Public Option, painting it as a public takeover of American healthcare.  Kyl, e.g.: "A stunning assault on liberty."

It seems that the fallback position is a trigger, which is commonly acknowledged among the left to be a fig leaf for capitulation.  It bounces the idea down the road to a point where we're more likely to fail in getting it passed.  The trigger can be overridden with ease and is therefore not much of a trigger at all.

Governors are complaining loudly that their states would not benefit.  So why not give them what they want -- let states opt out?

States could set up their own devices -- triggers, co-ops, whatever.  The reason we need to have universal buy-in is to avoid the adverse selection problem.  Let's say 40 (or even 30) states do not choose to opt out -- this would still be an adequate size to largely solve that problem.

Sure, we'd have marginally higher premiums due to states with particularly high heart disease rates remaining under the plan and some of the healthiest states opting out.  But this difference pales in comparison to the adverse selection problem of only covering those who statistically require the most care (e.g., 50-year-old heart patients who buy versus healthy 18-year-olds who don't).

Let them opt out.  Give them the "liberty" of our current health system.  The harm to the Public Option would be relatively light; their choice would show quite vividly the difference between states with a strong public option and those without.  When offered the actual choice, rather than the rhetorical farce, many teabaggers might choose the very thing they screamed against.

It would accomplish the goal of providing decent health insurance while making the right actually deal with the consequences of their rhetoric, which would be all kinds of fun.  So why wouldn't this work?

Condemning Joe Wilson is the worst kind of opportunistic nonsense.

It's holier-than-thou.  It's petty.  It's sure as hell unnecessary.  But most of all, it's dishonest and unworthy of who we should be.

Are we really offended?  Outraged?  Seriously, is your sense of decorum injured by this?  Is this "just not done" in polite society?  Egads, Ethel, that man just showed us his tallywacker in public after Labor Day!

Is it strategically sensible in the slightest way to protest so loudly over our honor, dignity, feelings, sensibilities, or whatever having been offended?  Are we that thin-skinned that we require a ritualistic apology so that we might make him lose face?  Assuming we are, do we want to appear that way?

He currently looks like an intemperate fool.  Can't we just let him continue on that course?  Couldn't we be magnanimous for a few seconds?  Must we act like vultures?  And by the way, do we have to do the only-slightly-oblique oh-of-course-after-all-he's-from-the-South references, as if that makes us worldly?

But, as I said, let's ignore all of that.  Let's look at the act itself.  Do we really believe it was wrong?  He disagreed with the person in power in that room and he just said so.  Can't we, a country which supposedly distrusts authority, have a little bit of healthy disrespect for it?  If we condemn his outburst merely because his opinion was contemptible and intellectually crappy, we are the dirtiest hypocrites for protesting due only to the convenience of an easy target.

What he did wasn't wrong.  It was a welcome change from the faux-adult "discourse".  Let's have some principles and stop making this bizarre claim that anyone might ever be required to respect anyone else simply because of a title or circumstance.