You cannot totally dislike a group with that kind of team spirit, so I hope those were not the exact same people carrying the sign that equated the health care bill with the Holocaust.

There was something sort of touching, in an eerie, slightly disturbing way, when John Ratzenberger  the guy who once played the mailman on “Cheers”  told the crowd that the health care bill advocates were “Woodstock Democrats” like Abbie Hoffman and Wavy Gravy. The crowd seemed on the old side, but is it really possible that any of them are still worrying about Abbie Hoffman? That any of them knew who Wavy Gravy is? Wasn’t his main claim to fame giving out free granola? Is this a problem we need to deal with at the present moment?

But I digress, sort of. If the health care vote happens this weekend, perhaps you will want to flip back and forth between the football games. Try to picture Minority Leader John Boehner as an overage cheerleader with a strange-colored tan.

A while back, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was promising that the House bill would have a “robust” public option that would have offered real competition to the insurance companies, thus driving costs down. But then Pelosi was faced with a mini-rebellion from red state Democrats who were terrified by the news of Republican victories in races having nothing whatsoever to do with Barack Obama, Congress or health care, and she modified the plan.

Now it’s a nonrobust option, sort of like decaf instant coffee. And even if it passes, the bill will go to the Senate where everybody is embroiled in an argument over whether the public option should involve a trigger, as Olympia Snowe urges, or an opt-out, which Majority Leader Harry Reid is peddling, or be eliminated altogether so the red state Democrats are pacified and Joe Lieberman does not go through with his threat to filibuster.

Although Lieberman is no longer a Democrat and backed John McCain in the last election, his former party did let him hang around and keep his important committee chairmanship. Supporting an attempt to kill the Democrats’ most important piece of legislation through a parliamentary procedure would be a tad churlish. But there we are.