National health care advocates are feeling pretty s-chipper

Number one item in this post on Graeme Frost:

1) I told y'all this was going to happen. Maybe next time you'll listen, hmmm?

Weirdly triggered angry email from liberal commenters, who offered this as an example of my tendency to make snotty dismissals of liberals. This is weird because, of course, I was talking to conservatives, in re my earlier post on the general political unwiseness of attacking programs that give money to cute children.

Meanwhile, conservatives think I'm nuts, and also maybe a closet liberal, because I think that the battle over S-Chip--whatever the merits of the case--is doing more harm than good to the righteous crusade against government-run health care. But I'm not the only one who thinks this; so do the advocates of national health care. Or at least one of them, anyway:

Granted, MoveOn's support can be a mixed blessing, as the critics of the war found out after the infamous "Betray-us" ad. And, let's face it, health care may never be the kind of galvanizing issue that war is. But the fact that Bush's S-CHIP veto is already sparking protests suggests this may be the beginning of something new--and, for the supporters of universal coverage, something promising. By galvanizing universal health care's advocates, Bush's veto might do a lot more to make universal health care likely than expanding S-CHIP ever would have.