The prelude to enacting health care reform was merely a warm-up for the ugliness and gross deceit in store for the nation from now until the November elections as the Republican Party and its hangers-on embrace the worst politics they can dredge up.
The GOP will anesthetize its odd collection of Tea Party street people—principally a witches brew of "birthers" who insist President Obama is foreign-born, 9/1l conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, KKK disciples and incurable loonies—into a state of rapture with the chant "Kill the bill!" The sheer idiocy of that promise is obvious. Once benefits begin to take effect (notwithstanding flaws in the bill that must be eliminated), the GOP won't have the popular support or votes to repeal the law; even if it did, who believes President Obama would sign a repealer?
Of course, this is the sum total of the Republican Party's blueprint for a comeback: Recruit an army of hopelessly uninformed, cruelly misled crackpots to create the impression that most Americans oppose the legislation.
On what grounds, one might ask?
If it's cost, where were these converts to budget austerity when President Bush was wiping out a huge surplus and driving up historic debt and borrowing?
Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., had a simpler theory: "Freedom dies" with passage of the bill. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., who once predicted President Obama would establish a Gestapo-like Marxist dictatorship, dismissed the health bill as being as worthless as Confederate currency after the "Yankee war of aggression."
While Tea Party rabble assembled on the Capitol steps, where black congressmen were vilified with racist obscenities and spit upon, the crazy lady in the House's attic, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.—who believes the Census is for rounding up dissidents to be imprisoned in FEMA concentration camps)—took to the Capitol balcony to egg on the shouting and verbal mayhem.
Finally, Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, shouted "baby killer" at Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., when he spoke in favor of the bill.
Across the Republican spectrum in Congress, members such as Sen. John McCain have threatened no more cooperation this year—hardly a surprise after months of "nay" votes—while dreaming up parliamentary delaying tactics.
So there's a slice of today's Republican national party—obstructionists vowing to cripple congressional work while hitching its fortunes to ragtag demonstrators who rely on venomous language, incomprehensible conspiracy theories and vile behavior.
And they want to govern the United States?