Keith Olbermann simplified the health care debate last night.  There is no more fundamental good than human life.  Since we can extend lives and alleviate pain, it is a moral imperative that we do.  I won’t try to summarize it.  Here are the clips:

Tonight, Keith put his money where his mouth (and heart) is:

Hasn’t the burden of proof shifted now?  Shouldn’t those opposed to Medicare for all or even a public option be forced to give truthful examples of industrialized countries with universal care that have higher costs?  Show us those modernized nations that have shorter life expectancies or higher rates of infant mortality.  (Check out who beats us on both measures: the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Austria, Australia, Finland, Greece, Italy, South Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland while Denmark ties us on life expectancy and beats us on infant mortality — all have universal, guaranteed coverage).

I’m not going to rehash what has been written in this and thousands of other spaces before demonstrating how national health care saves and lengthens lives as 40% less cost per capita.  We’ve seen Bill Moyers interview Wendell Potter, formerly of Cigna.  We know that 62% of all bankruptcies are caused by medical bills and that 78% of those people had insurance.

Yet, the best we hear from the other side is “socialism”, “waiting lines”, “death panels”, and “get your hands off my Medicare.”  I’ve not heard a serious, non-Beck parroting response yet.

So it’s easy to see why Congressman Grayson of Florida caused such a stir when he said the Republican plan on health care was to (1) not get sick and (2) if you do, die quickly.  It’s not that it was particularly offensive – we’ve seen far more offensive things said on the House floor for decades.  The Republicans may not be in the majority, but they didn’t attempt to pass a plan when they had Congress and the White House.  Considering that they still haven’t presented a plan (not that a minority party is obligated to do so) and instead rely on Palinish jingoism, it’s clear that Grayson’s comment was too close to the truth for comfort.

Pollster Frank Luntz told Republicans at the beginning of this process that they had to appear to be for reform in order to kill it.  Grayson blew their cover.

But the Republicans aren’t the problem when you have a 60 seat majority in the Senate along with a strong House majority and the White House.  Enough Democrats live in the lobby bubble that health care cannot survive without the only thing that can pierce it – publicity and the threat of primaries.  Olbermann has come up with a brilliant strategy to get the former while actually saving lives even if the political strategy fails.

Recently, I said that one difference between Fox and MSNBC was that MSNBC doesn’t manufacture the news.  This might not be manufacturing news in that Olbermann isn’t taking any event and manipulating it to appear to be something that it is not (the Fox producer in the clip below was doing just that), but Olbermann is now clearly part of the story.  He knows he will invite more comparisons to Fox and Glen Beck’s 9/12 Project, but he doesn’t care.

And he shouldn’t care.

Glenn Beck said on his radio show that he hated 9/11 widows, referred to himself as a “clown”, fantasizes on air about killing political opponents, and spouts the same incomprehensible blather about Obama’s racism or taking the country back.  Olbermann is highlighting the substance of a serious issue and doing something to save lives.  Media critics and journalism professors may compare the effectiveness or ethics of Beck and Olbermann as “journalists”, “advocacy journalists”, “opinion-makers”, “activists”, “talk show hosts” or under the criteria of whatever category in which one might place them.

But as human beings, there is no comparison.  All journalists are advocacy journalists.  They present assertions of facts, edit others, and make conclusions about relevancy in part based upon their own visions of what is important to consider.  In much of the international press, being open about moral or political biases is seen as ensuring reliability by empowering the reader to judge whether bias is tainting factual presentation or enlightening an issue with context.

The Fox crowd chooses to focus on gun-toting nuts at political rallies who “want their country back.”  Olbermann focuses on sick people who need their health back.

So let’s applaud a journalist with the guts to take a stand, back it up with his own fortune, and tangibly help heal the sick in the process.  Well done, sir.