I just had Christmas dinner with my right wing family members and Jane has some new fans. Generally, political talk is not allowed at family gatherings, at least not the ones I am at, though the rest of them could cheer each others’ opinions on all day. This Christmas, not only could we talk politics, we were on the same page. My dad is the farthest right and most vocal of the group. He’s also the one who has given me every book Glenn Beck has ever written.

I asked my dad if he had heard that Jane Hamsher and Grover Norquist had sent a joint letter to Holder asking for an investigation of Rahm Emanuel. He hadn’t been plugged in, but was intrigued, so I told him more about it. He’s now one of Jane’s biggest fans. My dad won’t sign her petition because he’s afraid he’ll get emails from lefties, but he wants me to keep him apprised of what FDL’s doing on the issues we have common ground on and he made a donation through ActBlue.

He was really angry about the health care bill, which I expected. What I didn’t see coming was that he hates this bill without a public option more than he hated the idea of a foothold for socialized medicine. He thinks that we ended up with the worst of all options because it was done by special corporate interests and special senatorial interests and nobody cared about regular people. He has great insurance as management for a defense contractor, but he doesn’t like to see other people screwed or monopolies given more power or banksters rewarded and left to go back to everything they were up to before. He was very impressed by Jane going after a fellow Democrat and to hear that a big block of the progressive community puts principle over party. He’s looking at bailing on the Republicans because he thinks they are corrupt, too. AND THIS IS A GUY WHO STILL LIKES CHENEY!!!!!

He said that he has had a similar experience with a friend from work who is left wing. They argued as much as we used to about politics before, but in the last year or so, they are on the same page a lot.

There’s a shitstorm a comin’ my friends. If it buries Rahm as it goes by, my dad and I both agree it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

By the way, he’s also impressed that progressives aren’t falling for Harry Reid’s "those darned other senators made me do it." He thinks that Obama should be more worried about looking like a weak unprincipled loser who would do something harmful just to say he did something, anything, than looking like a loser because he didn’t get a bill passed. And he’s okay with allowing people to buy into Medicare, too, as long as it’s optional. But he’s against the House plans for public options because he thinks it will just add to the expensive and evil federal bureaucracy where people land to be paid off for political favors and lazy people go to be paid to do very little after joining evil unions (I told you he’s a wingnut). When I told him progressives preferred administering any new option through Medicare, too, because we’re for coverage, not wasteful spending, he was a little surprised, but pleased.

So I say that whatever happens to this current monstrosity of a health care bill, we should start pushing all those so-called progressives to ram through a Medicare buy-in for all uninsured of any age in lieu of the high risk pools that we all know won’t do anything anyway.

And thanks, Jane, for being an example even my dad can accept of why those darned liberals are not even part of the problem, but are part of the solution. It was a great Christmas present for both me and my dad.