Things are getting pretty heated in the Capitol with crowds of anti-Reform/Tea Party activists going through the halls shouting slogans and epithets at Democratic members of Congress… [A] few moments ago in the Longworth office building, a group swarmed a very calm looking Henry Waxman, as he got on the elevator, with shouts of "Kill the bill!" "You liar! You crook!" ... Just after Frank rounded a corner to leave the building, an older protest[e]r yelled "Barney, you faggot." The surrounding crowd of protest[e]rs then erupted in laughter.
After tomorrow, we will be on the road at long last to providing better healthcare coverage to thirty two million uninsured Americans, allowing young people to remain on their parents' policies until just before they are thirty, to eliminating egregiously immoral practices by for-profit insurance companies like enormous arbitrary rate-hikes, annual limits that expose even insured folks to bankruptcy if they confront serious medical crises, canceling policies when people get sick and actually need the coverage they have been paying for all their lives, de facto denials of treatment to seriously ill policyholders through the bureaucratic limbo of endless deferrals of actual decisions that could legally be protested, or refusing coverage to folks who have any of a number of bewildering endlessly ramifying "pre-existing conditions."
This modest reform in the direction of fiscal sanity and social decency (still far short of the sensible single payer public healthcare system actually demanded by the problems at hand and available for generations in democracies around the world) is what is drawing these "libertarians" of the Republican Party base screaming into the Halls of Congressional representatives. This modest reform, achieved after a year of literally unprecedented obstructionism by Republicans aided by a handful of the most cynically corporatist and socially reactionary Democrats, amidst the storm-churn of endless mass-mediated deceptions and frankly ridiculous fear-mongering, is what is whomping the "tea-partiers" into this frenzy of racist hate, shaking their fists, queer-bashing, howling about socialism.
It is an almost unbearably ugly desolating horrifying nausea-inducing spectacle, to be sure.
Contrary to the pathetic adolescent fantasies of so many Republicans early on in this process that its failure at their hands would prove the symbolic undoing of Obama's election and could somehow obliterate the factual reality of the secular multicultural nation that elected him -- healthcare reform, even in the compromised form of its eventual arrival, has come to represent the Republican party's own Waterloo.
What we are witnessing in the dot-eyed desperation of the ever-smaller ever-louder "Tea Party" Base, of the right-wing's hate-radio stars and Fox Noise squawking heads, and erupting from the mouths of the faux-eminences of the GOP leadership, is the exposure of Movement Republicanism's utter moral, civic, and intellectual bankruptcy.
It remains to be seen if the Republican Party corrects course in the face of this debacle, or splinters into a neo-Confederate rump orbited by white-racist and Christianist-theocratic and Ayn Randroidal would-be Third Parties, none of which can remotely pretend to command the demographic or geographic resources necessary to a party capable of actual National governance.
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