I honestly don’t know what’s going on in Congress with health care reform. Here is Ezra Klein’s latest and Brian Beutler’s latest. The sticking point at the moment appears to be financing.

At The Guardian, Rose Ann DeMoro writes that the government sure as hell had better do something. If you want to be thoroughly depressed, however, read the comments to the article, in which American dittoheads tell Europeans how much better the U.S. system is to theirs. It’s embarrassing.

However, see also P.M. Carpenter, “Healthcare Reform and the Lure of Despair.”

I’ve been among the guiltiest of prejudgers of coming health-care legislation, essentially, or even explicitly, on occasion, declaring a robust public option doomed before birth. I now question the wisdom of that prejudgment, although, obviously, it may well prove to have been deadly accurate.

The chief cause of my self-questioning is not some pollyanish, utopian epiphany that has befallen my brain. Rather, it has been the overwhelming totality of like-mindedly negative prejudgments I’ve repeatedly encountered from around the Web.

And they’re downright depressing — premature tossings in of the towels; emotional declarations of it’s all over before it’s actually over; black, foreboding, self-righteous brayings of I told you so, again, before there’s even anything of substance on the Congressional table for us to be told about.

These are the Sarah Palins of online progressivism: the whiners, the quitters, the inactive activists, the incurably discontented voices of departure from Washington’s camp of Valley Forge before the first snowflake descends. And I’m embarrassed and ashamed to confess that too often I have had one foot in the retreating camp.

Normally I’d be with P.M. on this, but right now I’m feeling pretty bleak about it all. I still say if there’s no public option, they might as well not bother. And the public option still seems like an uphill struggle.