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Ed Schultz pretty well lays it in the line with what a whole lot of the progressive community thinks about President Obama right now. Katrina Vanden Heuvel from The Nation weighs in on how "angry, infuriated and heartbroken" the base is and that they need to stand up if they don't want things to be very ugly in 2010. As Ed notes, the President needs to quit listening to Rahm Emanuel and the insurance lobby and start paying attention to those that got him elected.

Transcript via Lexis Nexis.

ED SCHULTZ: Good evening, Americans. And welcome to THE ED SHOW from New York.

Mr. President, pull that chair up in front of the fireplace here. What you say we sit down and have a little talk here tonight? What do you think, huh?

The base is restless. They are wandering in the wilderness, Mr. President. They are looking for your GPS coordinates.

They want to know, where are you? They think we can do a heck of a lot better. Liberals and progressives think that they`re not being treated properly.

Right now, Mr. President, your base thinks you`re nothing but a sellout, a corporate sellout, out that. I know it`s tough audio, but I`m your buddy Ed. I`ve got to tell you this. I don`t think anybody else is.

You aren`t listening to the very people who put you in office, Mr. President. This isn`t about your legacy. It`s about the people in America who need health care now.

Mr. President, I don`t know if you`ve noticed or not, but you have carved out the most important elements of reform. The only people who like this current bill right now, Mr. President, is the insurance industry. They get a bunch of new customers.

Here is what Wendell Potter, a friend of mine, told me on the program last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WENDELL POTTER: The Senate bill is full of loopholes, and the insurance industry knows that. In fact, they`ve made sure that they are in there.

One in particular will allow employers to charge certain workers thousands of dollars more just based on health factors. And it can be obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol.

The insurance industry will be able to write the rules. They are not being set in the legislation as currently written.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCHULTZ: Mr. President, don`t leave the room. We`ve got some more talking to do. You can`t make it?

Apparently none of that matters. You see, at the White House, not long ago, the president told liberal Democrats to suck it up and listen to Joe Lieberman`s version on health care.

Now, here`s what gets me. The guy standing behind Obama is the biggest taker from big pharma and the insurance industry. Our old buddy, Max Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee, is taking $3.4 million from the health industry over the last six years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That`s an average of $1,500 a day to Baucus from big health care.

Now, the travesty continues. Last night, 30 Democrats voted against an amendment that would help you and me, the consumers -- the drug importation bill.

It would let consumers buy prescription drugs from overseas at a fraction of the price that we pay right now. But you see, voting for it would have really endangered the deal that the White House cut with big pharma.

Mr. Personality, Rahm Emanuel, he must have gotten a hell of a deal. So, the Democrats got together and they killed it. So much for change we can believe in.

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Katrina Vanden Heuvel, the lone liberal voice during the panel discussion on This Week pointed out the obvious about our war on terror and what we're doing in Afghanistan.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... let me put the counter… and let me put it, the question, to you this way. If they see us leave Afghanistan, wouldn't the Pakistanis say, "We're next. They're going to abandon us again"?

VANDEN HEUVEL: No, I think it's much more complicated, and our occupation of Afghanistan is going to deepen divisions in Pakistan and destabilize an already fragile civilian government.

I mean, we are already engaged in a secret war in Pakistan. The Nation's cover story this week, based on multiple sources, shows that Blackwater is working with the Joint Special Operations Command, planning targeting assassinations and drone campaigns. This is fundamentally destabilizing. We need another policy.

The larger overlay of all of this, in my view, is our overreaction to the terrible, horrible tragedy of 9/11 has led us to wage war against terrorism. You cannot wage a conventional war, which we are doing in Afghanistan, against an odious, horrifying set of ideas or tactics. And until we end that, we are, as an American people, going to have a de facto policy of permanent warfare. Do we want that in our country?

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It looks like Rush Limbaugh's glee over the United States losing the bid for the Olympics was even too much for Joe Scarborough to take.

Scarborough: I would like Rush Limbaugh to tell me Mike Barnicle...who's he helping there other than Rush Limbaugh? Because I would tell you middle Americans--Rush is smarter than that--middle Americans that swing elections see that and "Oh my god, Republicans have gone off the deep end."

I hate to tell you Joe but a lot of people I know realized the Republicans went off the deep end a long time ago. And Katrina Vanden Heuvel is exactly right. The Republicans would have attacked Obama no matter how this went down. If he hadn't gone, they'd have been saying the other heads of state went and he lost it for America. If he'd gone and the U.S. had gotten the bid, they'd be attacking Chicago for their dirty politics. You cannot win when dealing with these people who as Paul Krugman rightly pointed out that you were so dismissive of later in the segment... have "the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old".

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Out numbered as usual like any actual liberal on the Sunday bobble head shows, Katrina Vanden Heuvel makes some great points about why job creation is so important right now for some actual economic recovery to take place, and she's right about the so called health care reform.

VANDEN HEUVEL: You know, John Kenneth Galbraith once said that astrology -- that economic forecasting exists to make astrology look good. In these conditions, Matt, it’s very hard to have predicted what we would see. And don’t forget, the danger of the health care reform is that is it weakened and diluted in the way that the recovery package was so as to address Republicans’ concerns.

That could have been a stronger recovery -- but not strong enough to do what you rightly suggest, which is, parks, bridges, tunnels, an industrial policy, which may make George go berserk because it sounds like socialism, which it isn’t, every advanced industrialized country has an industrial policy which would address the auto industry. Build light rail, buses.

Full transcript below the fold.

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On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Matthew Dowd tries to equate the left's hatred for George Bush with the over the top attack by the right wing about Obama's speech to school children. I'm sorry Matt, but it's not the same thing.

As Digby pointed out in her post where she talks about the media fueling this nonsense, there is a difference.

I know how she feels. I had the same reaction when George W. Bush was on television every five minute launching invasions of other countries for no good reason and yammering on about how oceans once protected us and now drone planes with biological weapons were coming to kill us all in our beds. It's easy to understand why this woman would be equally freaked out by the president trying to make sure everyone can go to a doctor when they get sick. It's scary stuff.

There's a part of all this that's simply a matter of the right riding the existing zeitgeist. For years liberals loudly denounced the neocons for their megalomania, warning about the ramifications of an America that has become a rogue superpower, torturing, invading and spying on its own citizens. It was a violent, frightening time with some real world consequences that are still not fully understood or absorbed.

The right, with their pretense of assuming the moral positions of their opposition, twisting their rhetoric to suit their own needs and basically use the other sides' own methods against them, have simply jumped on the bandwagon now that their boy is gone. These people are posing as civil libertarians afraid of an authoritarian take-over,something we all have felt recently. Because they've absorbed all the fear and concern of the past years, even as they rejected it, they are now able to emotionally apply it to the president they hate and it has the same emotional resonance, even if it is completely ludicrous.

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Katrina Vanden Heuvel does a pretty good job of talking about how all of this is being fanned by "a right wing media that wants to cripple or take down Obama's presidency" and how we didn't see this when President's Reagan and George H.W. Bush spoke to school children, and then Dowd follows with this.

Dowd: Well it reminds me, to be honest it reminds me of exactly what the left was doing to George W. Bush in this time. There was no way no matter what he said, how he did, whatever he talked about that they would accept, react to well at all, no matter what he did. And the same is happening to Barack Obama.

In Matthew Dowd's world, the left being upset about being lied into war, the spying, the torture, stolen elections, using 9-11 to scare the crap out of the American public, tax breaks for the rich who don't need it, using the Department of Justice as a political arm of the White House and getting a Governor thrown into jail, outing a CIA agent because her husband dared to speak out against Dick Cheney, putting industry hacks in charge of every government oversight agency, and I could go on but I'll stop... being upset about those things is exactly the same as the right wing freaking out over a speech given to school children by President Obama. I don't think so.

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Two political pundits on opposite sides of the aisle found themselves agreeing Sunday on ABC's "This Week." Both George Will and Katrina Vanden Heuvel favor a withdrawal from Afghanistan. In his Washington Post column, George Will said it was time to get out of Afghanistan. In another column, Will said that that US work in Iraq is done.

Vanden Heuvel agreed. "I think there's a coalition, George. We can go on the road. A coalition for realistic foreign policy. But for these neocons attack you, these people should not be in our political life. They have no credibility. They should be held accountable for the Iraq debacle."

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During the panel discussion on This Week, Liz Cheney contradicted the reporting in The Daily Beast and from Jane Mayer and claimed her father would not have substituted his judgment for that of the CIA. She attacks Lawrence Wilkerson personally as having "fantasies" about what the Vice President has done since he left office.

As Think Progress notes her statement is also directly contradicted by the reporting from PBS's Frontline special The Dark Side. Perhaps Ms. Cheney thinks the producers there were just having "fantasies" about her father as well.

Speaking of fantasies, or maybe better put..nightmares..for anyone that wants a chuckle check out Driftglass' take on Cheney's appearance on This Week. The Photoshop work to go with this quote is priceless.

Even though the official Drag Queen Name Generator of the 2012 Olympics gives his proper nom de hey-now as "Sofonda Cox", today when Dick Cheney strapped a funny blond wig to his head and went abroad among the living on “This Week” , he used the lady-with-man-junk name of "Liz".

Either way, he fooled no one.

I'd like to know why Liz Cheney thinks anyone should believe she's privy to any of the information she claims to have knowledge of other than receiving talking points from her father.

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It's awfully nice to see one real liberal on This Week's roundtable. Katrina Vanden Heuvel gets to the heart of the matter. (In another part of the discussion, she pointed out that the arguments over torture "aren't a political football game" and chided the other panelists that outside the Beltway, things look very different.)

STEFANOPOULUS: The White House is obviously sensitive to this charge on flip-flopping, but does it matter if you end up in a place where you're going to get a lot of support?

CARVILLE: Look, first of all, if you say that my general said I shouldn't release this, it'll cause a spike, and the president says okay, I won't release it, I mean, I think that, as George pointed out, was something he said during the campaign, we'd be awfully uncomfortable as Democrats if he was releasing these pictures tomorrow and these were things that General Petraeus and Secretary Gates were saying - and with a new command coming into Afghanistan, General McCrystal, would have said, "Don't do that," so let me tell you, as a Democrat, I'm very glad he decided to listen to what his commanders said. And it may very well be that as it winds its way through the courts, the courts will release them anyway.

STEFANOPOULUS:: That may be, and maybe part of the calculation is that they are gonna come out eventually. But we're at a critical time in Iraq now as troops are moving out of the cities, we're heading toward elections in Afghanistan and the timing here did matter.

CARVILLE: Right. And again, you would not want to be president and have the secretary of defense and your top commanders come back and say we advise against doing this. That would make me uncomfortable, and I'm a pretty good Democrat.

CHENEY: Those same people advised against doing it before the White House publicly announced they would be releasing those photos, so it's a little disingenuous to say, you know, he made the decision based on what the military commanders were saying

VANDEN HEUVEL: But it's also buying the military argument that the release of these photos will increase violence. These photos - Guantanamo, Bagram - that has been the cause for any anti-Americanism and our actions, our policies in escalating in Afghanistan.

CARVILLE: I agree with you, we became infatuated with torture. We should have never done that. However, given the reason that you have these photographs is because they exist, having said all of that, if these generals come in and you're the president and they said you shouldn't do it right now, I don't envy the decision, but I'm more comfortable as a Democrat with him making this decision than another decision.

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Katrina Vanden Heuvel responds to David Shuster's questions about those on the left with concerns about Barack Obama's cabinet appointments. Vanden Heuvel points out that leaders in the past like FDR were centrists who were moved to govern as progressives because the times demanded it and feels the same may end up being true of Obama. When asked to respond to Steve Hildebrand's remarks I think she is right on the mark with this response:

Well I think tone is half of life and there was a tone in there like, don't speak up and what this country is about and what Obama's campaign and the moment, the movement around his campaign was about respect and power and include. That was his mantra. And it was bringing people and their voices into a system. This is a former community organizer. He is the first community organizer in the White House and he talked about change from below, fighting for change from below.

Hildebrand isn't on the right page. He didn't need to say that. And you know the left's progressives, I think, you know we need to get beyond the labels. As I, centrism today David has been redefined. Centrism today is about improving the conditions of people's lives through massive government intervention and stimulus and showing that government can do that.

She's correct and the center has shifted to the left despite the best attempts by the media to continually paint the United States as a center-right nation. I also agree that Hildebrand is not on the right page, even though he is correct that it is not fair to criticize Obama too harshly before he's had a day in office. But I'll also take a page from David Sirota on this one:

First thing's first: I absolutely agree with Hildebrand that you can't draw concrete conclusions about Obama based only on his personnel decisions -- and I've written that repeatedly (and I've also said that most of Obama's policy declarations have been pretty progressive). However, Hildebrand implying that those personnel decisions really don't matter at all is straight up silly. It supposes that all the enormous egos that populate a White House are just mindless functionaries, and that even though those egos are heading major federal departments or are key advisers, they have no hand in making policy and/or their advice to a president makes absolutely no impact. Please -- let's get real.

But far more important than that is Hildebrand firing up the whaaaaaaaambulance to whine and cry and moan about "the left." Really, what is with top Democrats explicitly attacking "the left wing of the Democratic Party" in Fox News-style talking points? Why is every substantive, non-partisan, non-ideological question of pragmatism from progressives almost automatically portrayed as some sort of super-Trotsky-ite, ideological and wholly inappropriate demand for Obama to be a president "just for those on the left?" Can anyone even ask a non-ideological question of Obama without being attacked as some sort of raving left-wing lunatic?

[...]

Are such questions really the inappropriate queries of a bunch of radical revolutionaries from "the left?" Or are the real fringe radicals -- the real ideologues -- those who say that we should all STFU and bow down to the Dear Leader? I think the latter, not the former -- and I think Democrats (and especially the Obama team) who rightly protested Republican efforts to tar and feather Obama as a "socialist" should know better than to echo such silly, fact-free talking points.

December 05, 2008 C-SPAN
Participating by remote access from New York City, priorities for the Obama Administration. She talked about her views on the policies the incoming Obama Administration should pursue, his Cabinet and advisory appointments so far, and the ideological direction of the nation. Ms. Vanden Heuvel also responded to telephone calls, electronic mail, and questions from Bowling Green, Kentucky, high school students, who submitted questions via Skype. See more CSPANJunkie Videos here!