Rachel Maddow on MSNBC last night echoed the exact same concerns that I'd mentioned previously, as well as adding in quite a few more interesting points, most notably that reconciliation has been used for medical reform nine times including the passage of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) or medicaid for children and the ever popular Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) which extends health insurance benefits to the unemployed.
As mentioned before, President Clinton tried passing his version of health reform through reconciliation in 1993, but this was declared a violation of reconciliation rules by Democratic Senator Robert Byrd.
The salient issue here is the blatant substitution of the term "nuclear option" for reconciliation. It allows Republicans to use Democratic objections against the 2005 Republican threat of the "nuclear option" against them in their proposal to use reconciliation now 5 years later to pass health reform. Democrats were not protesting the use of reconciliation in the videos the have widely circulated the conservative media, they were protesting the altering of Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster entirely.
Finding instances of Democrat hypocrisy is not hard, you need not make up lies to do so, and just to prove a point, I'll leave you with one final video below. In closing, just to be clear- reconciliation IS NOT THE "NUCLEAR OPTION."

