Cokie Roberts and her husband just penned an article that attacks liberals who have gone after the Ben Nelson's of the Democratic Party that are sabotaging health care reform. Steve and Cokie Roberts: Blessed are the majority makers. You see in Villagese, it's the few Ben Nelson's that has given President Obama the majority in Congress and not the other 257 House members and 59 Senators that actually give him the majority. To Cokie, the public option is nothing more than a gift to liberals that has no inherent significant in it that will impact health care reform. Sitting from her desk on the set of ABC, Cokie says she can craft the perfect health care bill without blinking an eye. Isn't she special?

STEPHANOPOULOS: it'll force him to go slower, which is probably a good thing, but the problem he may have is actually managing his liberal base.

ROBERTS: Absolutely, I think that is going to be the problem because look....you could sit here right now, even though it's complicated we can sit at this table and write a bill...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Insurance reforms, some costs control...

ROBERTS: And, but no public option and it's a bill that's actually been there for a very long time. You can take the Wyden-Bennett, it is a bipartisan bill. And Howard Baker and Bob Dole have a bill, you know there are bills out there that are doable. And if I had to guess in the end I think that's probably what is going to happen is something much more watered down ...

STEPHANOPOULOS:...But will the Howard Dean wing of the party go along?

ROBERTS: No, they are going to be absolutely furious and that is the problem that he's got right now. He's already got the liberals

NOONAN: Maybe it would be good for the president if he got absolutely furious about something.

ROBERTS: Well, I think that's the middle advantage. (Cokie's last words were tough to hear)

NOONAN: I understand what's going on, we got a little middle stuff going on around here, we got some centrism. That ain't so bad.

Peggy Noonan is so cute talking about centrism. That's a word she would never use if Reagan and Bush were in charge. Cokie is insufferable with her rant because it makes no sense, but that's a Villager for you. See, any elitist gasbag can craft sweeping health care reforms in an hour. I'm shocked that ABC didn't devote a ten minute segment so that Cokie could lead the round table to write the exact legislation that Congress should vote on and President Obama would sign into law. It would have saved the country so much time and energy. Why didn't she think of that? That Cokie is so brilliant.

In Cokie's world, we're the problem. It's not the obstructionist Republicans and all the health care establishment groups that have fought to block health care reform since 1948. Naw, it's OK for them to destroy it just like ABC's first guest---Newt Gingrich did. What Gingrich does is perfectly acceptable to the beltway weenies because that's the way she likes it. It's those dirty f*&king hippies that want true health care reform that are the problem. We actually have a voice at the table now and that's too much for her. How dare we ask for a good bill and not some watered down piece of crap that Roberts has a hankering for? The serious people in Washington think that Obama should trash his base while Bush should embrace his. Typical 1988 conventional wisdom. Conservative opposition to everything Democratic is the way the world turns under Cokie and the DC insiders. Oh, and what type of health care does she enjoy today? Conservative opposition to everything Democratic is the way the world turns under Cokie. Oh, and what type of health care does she enjoy?

(1971 - the brief respite between the World's Longest Party and Our Great National Nervous Breakdown)

Hard to imagine that 1971 was a sort of resting point in our rather skewed history. At the time of course, it didn't seem that way - in 1971 Campuses were still hotbeds of disturbance, Vietnam was still grinding on, cities were falling apart. But we were optimistic all was going to be okay with the world and prosperity was just around the corner.

Sadly, no.

This documentary, part of the NBC Radio series "Second Sunday", aired in April 1971 was concerned about our place in the world. A reassessment of who we were as a society - the old "who am I, what am I doing and where am I going" mantra that was so popular during those years.

And questions are posed to a number of people - Ralph Nader, newly elected Governor Jimmy Carter, Senator Howard Baker, Gunnar Myrdal, Jean-Francois Revel, John Gardner (founder of Common Cause) and Dr. Milton Eisenhower who offers this interesting observation:

Dr. Milton Eisenhower: “We do seem to have a new kind of violence in this country, we have some people who are actively advocating revolution, which I think is relatively new in America.”

Question: Where do think this will lead? Do you think this is a self-defeating thing?

Eisenhower: “ First let me say that there are nihilists, there are revolutionaries; most of them young. Many of them, in our colleges and universities. But it’s terribly important that the American people understand that they constitute a very small minority. They make a lot of noise and I may say the mass media give them a great exposure to the American people, but they can’t be more than one, two or three percent of the total. Yes, this is something new.”

Question: “How do you answer the argument that we engage in violence in Vietnam, so violence is warranted here in America. And those who argue that the system is so rotten and has such basic defects that the system itself is not worth preserving and hence you need revolution in this country to purify the government.”

Eisenhower: “Well I think that’s a terribly specious argument. If we lived in a dictatorship, and the dictatorship had proclaimed and carried on the war, and therefore citizens could do little if anything about it, one could well argue that in these circumstances revolution, internal revolution would be the corrective measure to take. But once the people themselves have taken possession of the basic social power, which is the situation in our free democratic society, and we exercise this power through a representative form of government, then the only way, the only reasonable way to get action is to work through these political procedures. All other methods are illegitimate and are self-defeating. Margaret Chase-Smith made a speech in the Senate that was worth the attention of the American people, in which she said that, if the left-wing extremists, who are causing a good share of the trouble don’t look out, they are going to drive America to the right. The danger in America is not going too far to the left – the danger in America is going too far to the right.”

That last quote is particularly telling considering where the country would wind up in the next decade.

Of course, at the time no one suspected a thing . . . .