What are you doing tonight, Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, and other Blue Dog Dems blocking real healthcare reform? If you can spare two hours, you ought to catch Michael Moore’s newly hyperpertinent documentary Sicko on The Movie Channel at 8 p.m. Tonight doesn’t work for you? You can also catch it on these dates.

We know it’s extra hard for lawmakers like yourselves to sit for two hours and watch the 2007 Oscar-nominated expose without squirming, if only because corporate and rightwing propagandists have successfully painted Moore as anathema to mainstream thought and any public option as "rationed" care with commie bureaucrats standing between you and your blah blah blah. You’ve been brainwashed to think this way because, as Wendell Potter, former head of PR for the insurance company CIGNA, explained to Bill Moyers the other night, flacks like him specifically targeted Democratic centrists like you:

BILL MOYERS (reading from an industry memo): And there was a political strategy. "Position Sicko as a threat to Democrats’ larger agenda." What does that mean?

 

WENDELL POTTER: That means that part of the effort to discredit this film was to use lobbyists and their own staff to go onto Capitol Hill and say, "Look, you don’t want to believe this movie. You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to endorse it. And if you do, we can make things tough for you."

As for the truckloads of dirt that Moore uncovered in the industry and the superiority of government-run systems in other countries, Potter says, "I thought that he hit the nail on the head."

It’s stuff like this that proves that not only is Michael Moore well within the mainstream on healthcare solutions, but that Bill Moyers is almost single-handedly keeping PBS relevant to modern journalism, though his techniques are as old-fashioned as a 1964 NBC "White Paper" report–just Bill, a guest, and a camera.

Senators, you can check out the full episode here. It’ll only hurt a little.