It's a marketing catch-all, with no fixed meaning.

Every reference to "the public option" is hogwash.

What are the terms of "the public option"?

How many people will it cover? Last time Obama claimed to support it, he said it would be for less than 5% of Americans. You can stick "strong" or "robust" in front of "public option" all you want, but if you don't address how many people can get it, and under what circumstances and terms, you have no idea of whether it represents any real change at all.

You don't know how it will be hobbled to protect the interests of Big Insurance who are the obvious beneficiaries of ObamaCare and the president's misguided focus on (potentially, sort of) slowing the rate of cost increases, instead of cutting them by half or more, as other countries have with single-payer or socialized medicine.

So, why are most of you treating "public option" as the Holy Grail?

So, why are so few of you pushing for real reform, like single-payer Medicare for All?

Oh yeah, because we don't want the decent to be the enemy of the meaningless.

Because we don't want to admit that people we trust (big bloggers, the MoveOns, Howard Dean) were fooled or are selling us out.

The powers that be have us coming and going. With progressives fixated on an empty marketing pledge, they can ignore us or give us the empty policy we're all begging for.

Heads they win, tails we lose. Unless we get smarter about what we ask for.