Still Reagan After All These Years

Think Progress:

When a weeping constituent at a Health Care Town Hall Meeting explained to Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma that her husband’s insurer is refusing to cover his treatment for a traumatic brain injury, he replied in classic Reaganauseating fashion that, “the idea that the government is the solution to our problems is an inaccurate, a very inaccurate statement.”

At what point will it occur to people to ask why these Republicans who hate government so much are drawn to participate all their lives long in so useless, so wicked an enterprise after all? Apparently, Republicans imagine that public services and infrastructure, health and safety regulation, public education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid should be left to profit-motivated corporatists and kind-hearted neighbors organizing bake-sales.

At what point will it occur to people that proposing the dis-invention of civilization isn't actually a civic-minded "proposal," doesn't actually pass muster as a "governing philosophy"?

It was Reagan who insisted decades ago that, contrary to our best efforts and hopes, government couldn't facilitate the public solution of otherwise intractable shared problems, but that "government is the problem." Ever since, they have made it overabundantly clear over and over and over and over again that when cheat-and-steal Republicans seize government it is indeed a problem for us all.