The government has been shut down for a week now, and I feel nothing but disgust.
I don’t want to repeat what everyone else is saying, but I find the Republican tactics in thie matter shameful, bizarre, selfish and patently un-American. The cabal, led by the Koch Brothers, the odious Ed Meese, the Club for Growth, the Heritage Foundation’s political action committee, was detailed in a New York Times article on Sunday. The piece shows that months ago, these rabid right wingers devised a plan to defund the Affordable Health Care Act by putting a gun to the head of the federal government and threatening to pull the trigger.
Before we even get into the substance of this tactic—namely, shutting down the government unless the Democrats agree to postpone implementing Obamacare for a year—let’s just ask what echo chamber these nuts are living in? The thought that the President and the Senate would sit for this, the idea that even most Republicans would want this, is patently delusional, almost unreal in a bizarro universe kind of way. It is an objectively so implausible, so practically unobtainable as to cast down on the sanity of anyone who advocates it. The only thing that one can say is that these are the fevered `Hail Mary’-type plans that seem plausible only to the truly desperate. In this case, let us remember, that these radical right-wingers are, behind their smug smiles, truly desperate. They are from the far right wing part of the political spectrum that has opposed National Health insurance for the better part of three quarters of a century. They have fought it long past the time when all other western democracies have instituted some kind of plan. They have fought it long past the time when they have paid lip service to supporting it.. They opposed it when Clinton proposed it. They declined to put forward a plan when they controlled Congress, and instead put forward a plan to privatize Social Security. They opposed this particular plan in in two elections, in two houses of Congress, and before the Supreme Court, and they lost, each and every time, and in every venue. And they have no respect for the fact that they have been told in no uncertain terms that they are wrong.
One of their basic arguments is that the American people do not like this plan. Well, I for one do not like this plan, but that doesn’t mean I want no plan. I prefer a single payer system. First, as Jimmy Kimmel demonstrated so brilliantly, most people don’t even know what is in this plan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx2scvIFGjE Personally, I think most people don’t like plans in general. Plans involve choices, and most people don’t really like to make choices unless it involves making a choice about things they like, like ice cream flavors of iPhone cases. They don’t like choices when it comes to thinking about what happens when we have leukemia, or have to get hooked to a dialysis machine, or whether they’d rather pay more per month in order to pay a smaller co-pay when they’re actually sick. The unpopularity of Obama’s plan is directly related to unpopularity of discussing illness and bills. Hey, I’m here to help you figure out how to pay for your cancer. But I believe that once the plan starts rolling, everybody will get behind it and think it’s fine. It will be the program. We’ll be happy to have it, and even if somebody comes up with something better, a lot of us will be grumpy and dislike it because it involves change.