Just sharing what I wrote in comments in response to Glenn's latest.

Reading this, one would get the impression that "public option" wasn't a meaningless agenda, for which none of its proponents would answer the most basic questions unpinning its exaggerated claims for how "highly adverse" it would be to Big Insurance.

Multiple posts on this at sig.

None of this challenges your basic thesis, but if one wants to see real political change and real health-care reform, we need to understand that what Somerby calls "career liberals" took progressives on a very wrong turn by accepting "public option" as the One True Agenda for health-care reform. In so doing, they blunted debate in left-leaning media outlets and grass-roots circles -- including debate that would have called into question Obama's, Baucus's, and Daschle's stunningly un-transparent processes which took more substantial reform off the table. And thus, citizens (including doctors and nurses) had to brave arrest to call any attention to single-payer proposals, not that they and their activism received anything remotely resembling support from the big bloggers, the MoveOns, etc.

I salute you for holding Obama accountable for his flagrant violation of his claims and obligations to transparency.

I submit that the benighted and unquestioning embrace of "public option," which as you've previously noted "was designed to excite and placate progressives," distracted rank-and-file lefties from the corrupted process you're properly calling attention to here, and it rallied them to fixate on an agenda so toothless (Obama claimed that if there were a public option, less than 5% of Americans would get it; David Swanson pegged it, based on the draft legislation, at 2%), it would have barely qualified as a flesh wound to the moneyed interests.

I understand that the supposed glories of "public option" aren't your main point, nor was whipping for it your profession. But by describing [it] as "highly adverse" to the insurance companies and repeatedly citing Obama's failure to stand up for it does help persist a costly myth that has pervaded the blogosphere throughout this year's health-care reform "debate."