The True Republicans

REPUBLICANS ARE BIBLE-THUMPING, MINORITY-HATING MANIACS! ALL OF THEM!!!!!!!

NO, YOU SHUT UP!!!!

SHUT UP! SHUT UP! BOO! BOO! BOO!!!!!

Okay, over my more-or-less sixty years, few axioms have held up as truisms. One of them is not to discuss religions or politics (or salaries). Another is that in show business, persistence is the only truth. And the third, a little less famous is this: the strength of any argument is inversely proportional to how loudly it needs to be expressed.

This is why the objections of the fanatics who gathered to shut down public hearings wigth their screaming about health insurance reform are displaying the weakness of their positions. They do not accept the logic of changing the system away from the wasteful current morass piloted by the Insurance industry. (Well, that is what they are being paid to demonstrate, at least). So they spend their idle hours trying to shout down the honest attempts at dialogue being held throughout the country in town hall meetings. This is a deliberate, admitted Republican strategy. Hey, "Just say no!" managed to work insofar as sustaining our damaging and ludicrous War on Drugs. So why not say "No?" to improving the country's health system?

This has become the season of idiocy, though not far removed form last year's August upheaval that brought us Sarah Palin. This year, as Obama's initial efforts at economic reform have started to take hold and are reflected in better stock numbers, reduced rates of unemployment, and stunning successes like the Cars for Clunkers program, the "loyal" opposition has gone haywire in its attempts to refute the success. The "Birthers" have had their moment or utter inanity, and Lou Dobbs on CNN his embarassment, but that hasn't stopped the process of Republicans edging their way toward Idiocracy. How can they help it, when their spokespeople are Palin, Joe the Would-be Plumber, and that crazy lady in Minnesota (not Michelle Bachman, the other crazy one who called Obama an Arab, though Michelle is truly a nut.) When you look at the folks who are leading the town hall disruptions, they all look like people who were turned away from a taping of Jerry Springer.

Since I am pretty rational it still stupefies me that people cannot see that a public option for health insurance will do a lot to lower the price of medical care because of the competition it generates, and because if everyone is insured, all premiums would be less. The Insurers of course do not want competition and are dissing any federal program in their knee-jerk SOCIALIST MEDICINE canard. How many ties must it be explained to the objectors in the room that Medicare and the Veterans Administration are two wildly successful government-run insurance programs? Probably infinity, which is equal to how many times Obama's birth certificate need be published before Lou Dobbs shuts the fuck up.

I'd like to think that the Democratic congresspeople who are being shouted down will still have the fortitude to do the right thing when the health care bill comes to a final vote. But since the Dems are such wusses I fear for the future of this legislation. Republicans may have many flaws in dealing with the rational and the real, but they do know how to act in unison to achieve whatever their goal is, even if it destructive. Blue Dog Democrats are still waffling and have so far failed to see the parallels between now and 1993, when the failure of Hillary-care led to popular disillusionment with the Dems and fed the well-oiled Newt Gingrich insurgency.