Be that as it may. . .
First off, the government is not shut down. Most of it, in my understanding, is still running. Edit: the number I am seeing is that 87% of the government is still running, and still getting paid. Obama is clearly, beyond any possible doubt, doing what he can to increase the pain associated with the 13% of government that actually is furloughed–as in shutting open air national monuments–but the reality is that the wheels of government are still churning through AT LEAST $100 billion a MONTH. It would be easier to know the exact number if Harry Reid would do his CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY and pass a budget, but that would be too embarrassing, so he won’t do it. And that, to be clear, is the reason that the House has to keep passing these Continuing Resolutions every few months, and has since Obama took office.
Second, and this is the most interesting point I want to make, at least to me, is that this standoff is forcing Democrats in one of two ways: the headless ones have no choice but to unleash hatred and venom at the Republicans, because the alternative would be to think of us as human beings just like them, who care for the poor, the country, their own families, and who simply have a policy disagreement, and are not evil human beings.
Thus they have to choose between reclaiming their humanity and granting that people can disagree with them without being monsters; and putting on public display the full extent of their posthumanistic viciousness, as Harry Reid did in not even understanding why it would be wrong to callously say he didn’t care about a kid dying of cancer, because after all OBAMACARE itself was at stake. You know, everything important.
It’s interesting to note, too, how they keep calling this awful law “healthcare”, or the “healthcare law”. It is nothing of the sort. Our hospitals, doctors offices, and other health provision services continue to operate just fine, and will if Obamacare disappears tomorrow. In fact, the only net effect Obamacare will have will be to make the actual provision of healthCARE, as opposed to insurance, less efficient and/or more costly. Rationing is very likely, because they will likely put price controls in place.
At the moment, though, only healthcare being denied is at the National Institute of Health, which Harry Reid refuses to fund for purely partisan purposes.
When I said Fidel Castro did not care that children for whom he is ultimately responsible were being treated with expired aspirin, I was being quite literal. Harry Reid has shown himself, clearly, to be cut from the same moral cloth. This is Cultural Sadeism, which is the elimination of principle based behavior. You do things not because they are right, but because they win you power. Justice, or human rights, or alleviating poverty: these are all rhetorical ploys. They don’t want to help people. If they did, they would feel BAD when they failed, and plainly they don’t. How many Detroit Democrats feel bad about their long term failure, about running the most prosperous city in the world into the ground? None, I suspect, not really.
In any event, as the Democrats get increasingly flustered as Obamacare fails in practice, and as the public increasingly blames Obama for not even TRYING to negotiate, their inner ugliness will get harder and harder to hide.
I said a week or so ago that I though the shutdown was a bad thing. I don’t think it is, IF the House Republicans continue to pass resolutions funding military families and other people who are directly hurt. If the Democrats continue blocking them, they can only rationalize that for so long before people start getting really pissed at them.
Yes, of course Obama and the left wing own most of the complicit media, but in my own observation if you read the actual comments people leave on articles posted on websites where people of both political persuasions go, like Yahoo, there is a groundswell both of knowledge and anger at the direction our country is headed that is stronger than anything I have seen in my lifetime.
Obamacare is a fundamentally flawed law. It will wreck things that are working, cost a fortune, and help very, very few people. It was passed on a strictly partisan basis, using parliamentary chicanery, and rushed through so fast the people who voted on it did not know what was in it. Given all this, asking that it be given a second look and modified to at least be less bad is not an unreasonable request.
Bill Clinton would have cut a deal with Republicans years ago, and is likely reminding Obama even now that he himself got to Yale on his own merits, and he had better listen to him. Clinton may or may not be advising a deal, but he is too good a politician not to see the risks of not even attempting to APPEAR interested in a compromise, or even bipartisan dialogue Obama, for his part, likely does not even see his arrogance for what it is.
Why do we assume Obama can’t compromise, can’t rewrite at least some parts of the law? Because he never has. He has never compromised on anything that I can recall. Not once. He is hyperpartisan, and the results of that, unsurprisingly, have been hyperpartisanship. What else can you do when the other side ignores you but knock them on the head with any means at your disposal? Power only responds to power, and the House is using the one club short of impeachment that it has.