I never said it was taken out of context. Since the video abruptly ends with the man in mid-sentence, it should be plainly evident that at best it's taken out of context, and at worst the context was deliberately omitted.
However, your contention that is was about making history, and therefore they don't need to worry about rules, is fundamentally incorrect, as that assertion and assumption is based solely on the partial video snippet, and in no way takes into account the actual context, of which both his complete comments and the setting in which they were made is important.
Hastings is a tool, I'll give ya that, and he incorrectly used an Edison out of context when he made those remarks, as Edison was talking about creating something entirely new out of essentially nothing, so the standard rules of invention didn't really apply to what he was going. Hastings, during a meeting of the Reconciliation Committee, used the quote as part of a pathetic attempt to defend the rather weaselly “deem and pass” strategy for approving the health care bill, which the Democrats ended up abandoning. "Deem and pass", incidentally, was first used by a Republican Congress, and was used extensively by the Republicans during the last Republican-controlled House. Hastings wasn't, as is suggested on countless Blogs, stating that Congress is making up the rules as they go along simply because they are trying to make history. .
Hastings said it was time to, “stop all of the rhetoric and get to the business of what’s at hand. The fact of the matter is that a lot of our fellow Americans are hurting and they don’t have affordable health care and for the life of me I cannot understand why we all should not be willing to share in order to help the least of them. I wish that I had been there when Thomas Edison made the remark that I think applies here: ‘There ain’t no rules around here — we’re trying to accomplish something.’ And therefore, when the deal goes down, all this talk about rules, we make ‘em up as we go along, and I’m here now 18 years, and a significant amount of that time here on this committee under the leadership of the Republicans…” yada yada yada
Like I said, sounds bite are nearly always taken out of context as it is, as that's the nature of sounds bites. And when they're purposefully further chopped up to mean something even different than the sound bite, it gets funny. And it gets funnier when people fall for that crap and buy into it, believing the chopped up bits and pieces to actually mean something relevant or important.
This health care mess is messy enough in just dealing with the actual facts, without having to deal with the twisted and the skewed. I'm now watching a very smug Obama talking about the just-passed health care legislation. That's real, and far more troubling than some video snippet edited and produced solely to get a rise out of a bunch of sheepletons.
(that's a new word I just invented. It's a combination of sheeple and simpletons).
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