The Republican attempt to nullify the last election and engage in unprecedented sabotage of a law for universal healthcare intensified today. It seems we effectively have no politics in this country right now – just political warfare, in which one party refuses to accept the legitimacy of election results. I once thought it would get worse before it got better, but it seems there is no bottom to the Republican spiral. It just gets worse and worse. There’s partisanship and then … there’s this derangement.
The moderate pundit, Norm Ornstein put it best; Obama’s attempt to lay out what he’d like to accomplish if we had a working political system was an attempt to frame the looming battle. I should realize this by now, but the current GOP clearly believes it is the only legitimate governing party in the US and its response to a loss is to intensify its rage. They never forgave Clinton for being re-elected; and the idea they’d let a black president leave a legacy behind is obviously inconceivable to them. And yes, that’s calling them irrational and not a little racist. But how else do you explain people who are actively attempting to persuade young adults not to get health insurance?
I’m trying to understand where the motivation comes from to actively keep people vulnerable to catastrophic debt and untreated illness. I couldn’t do that morally for my own interns. And yet here is a party seeking to ensure that young people are denied basic healthcare. I keep re-reading that sentence and trying to qualify it or make it less repellent to anyone with a conscience; but I cannot. I try to see how this fits with conservative principles of personal responsibility, but it doesn’t. It’s a campaign to persuade people to have less personal responsibility, to free-load on others, and at massive expense to everyone else. It’s a rejection of a decade of conservative thought on the issue. Which is why nihilism and vandalism are the only words I can come up with to describe these fanatics and haters.
Meanwhile, dolphins have names; the MidWest remains a mystery; a Window View Contest champ answered your questions; and Anthony Weiner‘s no Bill Boner.
The most popular post of the day – by far – was this elusive Window View (linked to by our VFYW champ); second was my take on the Weiner “scandal”.
See you in the morning.
The Dish 