"Socialized Medicine for Some, Miniature American Flags for Others!"

Let's hear it for the Rainbow Tour! At a fundraiser this morning in Israel, Robot Romney declared:

Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the GDP in Israel? Eight percent. You spend eight percent of GDP on health care. You’re a pretty healthy nation… We spend 18 percent of our GDP on health care, 10 percentage points more. That gap, that 10 percent cost, compare that with the size of our military -- our military which is 4 percent, 4 percent. Our gap with Israel is 10 points of GDP. We have to find ways -- not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to fund and manage our health care costs.

As TPM points out, the "way" Israel just happened to "find" to provide health care to more people and manage costs was the exactly predictable one that is the only one that ever works, and it always does: to adopt a government run healthcare system in which people are forced by mandate to buy insurance from highly regulated, price-controlled, competing not-for-profit plans, providing access to healthcare almost entirely in government-run facilities, all supported by progressive taxes. The system was installed in 1995 and modeled on successful European healthcare systems that Romney and other Republicans idiotically revile as tyrannical power-grabs by jackbooted thugs who are eager to form death panels to kill grandma. While this comment by Romney should certainly make Republicans even more nervous about the firmness of the convictions of their awful candidate, I don't think Democrats can take heart from this apparent momentary genuflection in the direction of obvious truths that defy Republican articles of faith, since it just demonstrates yet again that Romney has no core convictions at all, that Romney says whatever he thinks people with money or power right in front of him might want him to say from moment to moment, that Romney is a creature bending his will to the forces around him and one who has surrounded himself in this campaign with some of the most militaristic, plutocratic, patriarchal wingnuts in America.

Romney should lose in a landslide. If he doesn't, you should worry. If you don't help bring it about, you should be ashamed of yourself.