On the night the House passed the healthcare reform bill, Amanda and I dropped the kids at gramma and grampa's and went to the show--The Blind Side, at the Riverview in south Minneapolis, where a ticket for a 7:00 show on Sunday evening is still $3.00. If you stayed home and force fed yourself corn syrup for the show's running time, you'd be well past three bucks of corn syrup, so it is really quite a good deal.
What did I miss? I don't doubt George Packer, who called the Democrats' speeches uninspiring and the Republicans'--paraphrasing lightly--rabid, fanatical, crazed, foamy. What has become of my parents' G.O.P.? Newt Gingrich tweets that healthcare reform will ruin the Dems for the next forty years, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yes, what a shameful disaster that was! No one has ever understood what President Johnson could have been thinking. Do the Republicans have an argument that does not amount to offering political advice to the other party--the advice being, essentially, not to repeat their finest achievements? I pick on Gingrich because he has a reputation for being a big thinker of deep thoughts, don't ask me why. It would hardly be more ridiculous if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner were put forward as the Big Brains of the Republican party.
Here is a question: who, from the front ranks of the Republican party, deserves to be taken seriously? John McCain, on the morning after the vote, said that Democrats have "poisoned the well" and will get no cooperation from the Republicans. What does that even mean? They got no cooperation on healthcare, passed it anyway. How's the strategy working, Senator?
These guys seem eager to sweep to power on the shirttails of the Democrats' achievement. Why? So that they can invade Iran and rerun the economy into the ground? The Democrats' occasional victories have the effect of dividing the Republicans' failure into periods.
Over at Power Line, John Hinderaker directs readers to a site where they can pledge to support only candidates who will vote to repeal "Obamacare." But Obama will still be president, and Republicans will not have 67 senators even if they win every single senate race, which they won't. Being completely divorced from reality is what makes him such an apt spokesman for conservatism, American-style.
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