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Monday, September 30, 2013

The Jig Is Up

No death panels, no government takeover, no mass graves full of kids, no abortion malls, no concentration camps. There was always a whiff of legible -- if ugly, if craven, if opportunistic -- political rationality that drove the deception and hyperbole of the opponents of the Affordable Care Act. But lately the level of spastic desperation that has tinged the lies and egregiously irresponsible conduct of the Republicans has come altogether unmoored from predictably pragmatic calculation. Make no mistake, the Republicans don't think they can win: the Supreme Court and the last Presidential election pronounced that verdict unambiguously. What the Republicans face now is humiliating, devastating exposure as obvious liars and absolute crackpots. It's not just that people will like Obamacare, it's that almost nobody will feel a thing. Millions upon millions of Americans are going to confront the fact that they have been lied to, that they completely trusted people who have taken advantage of them. The Republican Party is having a collective freakout confronting the scale of their outrageous clownishness over the last four years. The diversity of the 2008 Obama coalition set the stage for this freakout, announcing that deep change is coming to the christianist/plutocratic coalition that maintained white-racist hegemony in America, and the Affordable Care Act was the first modest step in the direction of that change. The GOP has committed suicide on the altar of health insurance reform, and even they cannot help but recognize the scale of their folly. They may trash the place before they leave, but the country will put itself back together without looking back.

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