Joe Biden comments on health care reform

Vice President Joe Biden couldn't resist telling President Obama yesterday that signing comprehensive health care reform into law was a "big f***ing deal." It turns out, a number of people on the Internet agree with him.

After the vice president's apparently foul choice of words started to earn some attention, Hotsheet noted that White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs embraced the moment, Tweeting, "and yes Mr. Vice President, you're right..."

The micro-blogging site Twitter may be the perfect medium for capturing fleeting, interesting moments like Biden's remarks. Another Twitter user decided to preserve the moment with a new feed called BigFnDealer. The first message left on the feed reads, "FDR had the New Deal. Truman had the Fair Deal. J-Biden's gives us the Big F***ing Deal."

One online t-shirt retailer is exploiting the moment with t-shirts featuring Biden's profound statement, as well as t-shirts poking fun at Biden for being prone to such gaffes. There's also t-shirts smugly expressing the same sentiment as Biden: "I voted for Obama and all I got was this historic victory on health care," it reads.

Of course, the quote has also inspired some new Web sites: www.thisisabigf***ingdeal.com (the actual URL uses the full expletive) has a YouTube clip of the moment -- which you can watch below. And for anyone who wants to learn more about the man who uttered those words, the site www.abigf***ingdeal.com (again, the URL uses the full expletive) redirects visitors to the White House biography of Biden.

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Dan Boylan comments..

It required the stock market crash of 1929 and the more than decade-long Great Depression to create sufficient national anguish, liberal enough congressional majorities and a determined president named Franklin Delano Roosevelt to give old folks the benefits of Social Security, workers the right to bargain in the National Labor Relations Act, and savers the security of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Those laws constituted “big deals.”

And conservatives didn’t like them. Many on the right called Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the FDIC and a host of other New Deal bills “socialism” at best, “communism” at worst.

And Franklin Roosevelt? He was “a traitor to his class.”

Following World War II, the United States owned the world’s economy, and President Harry Truman thought the nation strong enough and fair enough to insure health care for all of its citizens. Twice Truman introduced comprehensive health care legislation; twice congressional conservatives thwarted him.

Johnson in the White House, liberal majorities in both houses of Congress, and civil rights activists in the streets resulted in a run of “big deals” over the next four years: the Civil Rights Bills of 1964 and 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, Medicare for Americans over 65 and Medicaid for the poor. But still, the wealthiest country in the world failed to provide access to health care for all of its citizens.

Both Presidents Richard Nixon and William Clinton pushed for national health care. Conservatives, both Democrats and Republicans, stopped them.

Last week, after 14 months of some of the most uncivil debate in American memory, a national health care reform bill passed. It required the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, sufficient liberal majorities in Congress and a determined President Barack Obama to do it.

And it is, indeed, a “big deal,” the first in more than 40 years.