And Now For A Word On Health Care, Chicken Little

Both on this site and on the Twitter, I’ve come to feel that when I’ve succeeded when I get a particularly vicious or personal response to my point. As the passage of the health care reform bill becomes a when and not an if the conservatives I follow have begun to go into desperation mode. Across the twitterscape I’ve read of coming slavery, and some women either giving or withholding favors of the adult variety to convince their gentlemen not to support the health care reform bill. Republican members of the Senate scream of the bill being voted on in the middle of the night to hide it from the American people, when their own procedural moves are what forced the vote to take place at night. One senator even seemed to tacitly hope that another member of the Democratic caucus would pass away before the vote (I don’t think he really meant death, but it was like hoping the opposing team has their quarterback run over by a bus before the big game).

Were does that leave us? I said in the midst of the deranged summer of tea parties that the bill would pass after Thanksgiving and it would lack a public option. The time frame is a little late but the public option seems to be dead as it’s not in the senate version and is unlikely to survive a conference process. But once the bill is signed and the President trumpets the achievement at the State Of The Union address in January, the shrill sky-is-falling rhetoric will fade into the distance. There are huge issues remaining for the Democratic party going into the mid-terms and Republicans do have more momentum than they’ve had since 2004, but jobs will remain the difference maker. As the nation pulls itself out of a staggering recession, if job growth starts in the spring and summer the nightmare scenario of losing the House will fade to just a Republican fantasy.

For the moment though, the Republicans have lost. It was pointed out on Political Wire that, had Republicans actually negotiated in good faith the bill would be far less comprehensive that it would have been. Also, for all the polling that seems to show the majority of Americans don’t like the present health care bill, it was basically exactly what the President spent the 2008 campaign promising he would do on health care. He won that election by the way by a wide margin. This has always been about defeating Obama and nothing else with Republicans, and they lost. Once the bill is a memory months from now and the constant screaming from health insurance companies fade, just remember. We won again and you lost. Suck it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 9:39 am and is filed under 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.