Wednesday, October 23, 2013

AS SUBTLE AS A DIESEL LOCOMOTIVE

Earlier this month I wondered here on how the party of John McCain and Lindsey Graham would pull the ten-foot-long-blazing-sword of hate and loathing out of the Tea Party's back. They had done it before you know when the Tea Partiests had conspired to carry off both ears and the tail during the fiscal cliff negotiations of January 2013. The old grand dames of the Republican Party trilled in dismay at the upstart hostage takers of the extreme right wing and forced them to back off and play nice. The thing is of course, that the upstarts had very cleverly, and I do mean really extremely amazingly cleverly worked with the Senate minority leader and the concession they got for caving in and allowing the Budget Sequestration demanded by the President to take effect, was that the Bush Tax Cuts were made permanent and signed into law by the President.*

I thought that was absolutely brilliant legislative politics. There hasn't been anything that smooth for decades, right up until last week when the extreme right wing rethuglicans caved in to the enormous pressure of all right-thinking persons and unilaterally conceded defeat and bowed to the inevitable demands of the Senate and President and the People! Yay!  Vorwärts Marsch!  Obamacare uber alles!

You remember what the fight was about, right? All that tussling and closing down every national park in the country was because the thugs said that Obamacare was no more ready to implement the Individual Mandate than it was to implement the Employer Mandate. Now the President unilaterally decided to back off on implementing the Employer Mandate by executive fiat which is his right in any communist dictatorship run by the hard left.

Perhaps the airwaves are filled with the cries of, "I told you so!" from the likes of the people all right-thinking people love to hate, but I don't listen to that stuff either. It's stories like this lame bit of Sebelius that make me laugh. The conniptions of all of them as they scramble around trying to fix the unfixable can only get more disturbing. It's like watching an RMS Titanic repair crew racing up to the giant hole in the side of the ship with a little tub of spackle and a putty knife. It's going to be painful and cost some people everything they have and more.

I am amused by Reuters slant on the news today. Judge allows suit to go forward. Other news services pointed out that the judge did not simply dismiss the law suit as "settled." It appears that in amidst all that smoke there might be a little bit of flame that could end up burning down the whole house. Isn't it odd though that Obamacare was passed legislatively on a strict party line vote and yet only 16 states have set up the exchanges mandated for its implementation. The rest of the states decided to stick with NO. Odd that. You'd think a majority of States and thus Senators, didn't want this as law.

I just get a kick out of it all. The very best talking heads the democrats could buy/own talked themselves blue in the face demanding that Obamacare be implemented right the fuck now! But just for the little people. They didn't mean it should be implemented as written for both employers and individuals.

On balance, I think that if I was them? I'd feel like an idiot right about now.

They made a great desert and called it a garden and yet nothing grew there.

As I said at the beginning, I suspected that the Tea Partisans had a cunning plan to outwit the ponderous dull-witted House of Reid and Pelosi but I had no idea at how elegantly simple their Machiavellian thinking would turn out. They threw up what they knew could only ever be a temporary roadblock to a really crappy piece of legislation knowing that they would have to cave in when the reliable stormtroopers known hereabouts as the Democratic Ministry of Truth locked on. I had no idea that their master stroke was simply going to be to bow politely, take one step back and allow the whole train to rush by and over the cliff to its doom. Congratulations guys! I couldn't have done that better myself.

Makes me wonder how many of those program managers for the health.gov site went down on their knees every night just before bedtime and begged God for one more week of rethuglican intransigence because they knew it wouldn't work. Oh yes. They knew.

2 comments:

The Chief said...

You are an awfully deep thinker for a sailor. It's amazing what a little world travel and forced personal responsibility can provide to those who embrace it.

HMS Defiant said...

Steeped in evil we were. At least that's what I heard whenever the First Lieutenant spoke to me.