Tom Harkin Drops the Mask

We’ve all seen journalists who while actively employed as reporters or TV newsreaders, swear up and down that they’re totally unbiased, and then once retired or transferred from covering a beat to writing opinion columns emerge as flamingly far left social justice warriors. (See also: Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Helen Thomas, and zillions of other examples.)

It isn’t just elderly Democrats with bylines who suffer from this malady as outgoing Iowa Senator Tom Harkin makes clear. Or as Ed Morrissey writes, Harkin “told The Hill that the Affordable Care Act was a huge mistake — but not quite for the same reasons Schumer believes:”

While Schumer belatedly lamented the lost opportunity to boost the middle class rather than climb on the Democratic hobby horse of health-insurance overhauls, Harkin regrets not doing more to demolish the health-insurance industry:

He wonders in hindsight whether the law was made overly complicated to satisfy the political concerns of a few Democratic centrists who have since left Congress.

“We had the power to do it in a way that would have simplified healthcare, made it more efficient and made it less costly and we didn’t do it,” Harkin told The Hill. “So I look back and say we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all.

“What we did is we muddle through and we got a system that is complex, convoluted, needs probably some corrections and still rewards the insurance companies extensively,” he added. …

Harkin says in retrospect the Democratic-controlled Senate and House should have enacted a single-payer healthcare system or a public option to give the uninsured access to government-run health plans that compete with private insurance companies.

“We had the votes in ’09. We had a huge majority in the House, we had 60 votes in the Senate,” he said.

He believes Congress should have enacted “single-payer right from the get go or at least put a public option would have simplified a lot.”

Well, that’s certainly one point of view. Perhaps Harkin really believes that the backlash against ObamaCare comes from a general sense that government should control even more of the health choices of Americans than it arrogated in the unpopular bill.

Here’s Tom in 2007 lying about a country that went single payer quite a long time ago:

[jwplayer player=”1″ mediaid=”77330″]

Of course, Harkin has previously lied about fighting in Vietnam as well. Good luck Joni Ernst — I’m sure you’ll do fine, but please do everything you can to rise above the reputation of your predecessor from Iowa.

And speaking of the above video, “Ho Chi Minh would be appalled if he could see Vietnam now,” PJM alumnist Michael Totten recently noted. Good! Faster please.

Related: Since Ed M. mentioned The Hill, the 20-year old DC newspaper and Website that specializes in covering Congress in his post, click on the two images imbedded in this Tweet for their own blatant example of “name that party” bias.