On Bipartisanship Take 2

W.O.W. That didn't take too long. In less than 24 hrs after I wrote that the Democrats should abandon all bipartisanship, the right wing partisans went off the deep end. Thus far, we've seen nutjobs start riots in Tampa and St. Louis, threaten the SEIU, and everywhere equating health insurance reform with Nazism.

Quick history lesson - the National Socialist Party had basically two factions - the Fascists who were primarily Nationalists (Hitler) and the Facists who had socialist tendencies (Brohm). When the Nazis were on the precipice of power, Hitler had Brohm wacked specifically to prevent any kind of socialism. Oh, and the Nazis were avidly anti-communist. So, calling Obama a fascist makes absolutely no sense.

Now back to reality. . .actually, let's discuss reality for a second. It seems to me that a good portion of these nutjobs are living in an alternate universe. First off, nobody knows what's in the health insurance reform bill because it hasn't been written yet. Second, there's no way the bill forces anyone to do anything. There are few protections for the most egregious behavior by health insurance companies - like rescinding health insurance when someone gets cancer - and hopefully, there will be a public option (a public health care system that you can use when health insurers won't cover you), but that's about it.

Oh, and for those of you who don't know - like Arthur Laffer - MEDICARE IS A GOVERNMENT PROGRAM!!!!!!!!!! And the reforms to Medicare that are proposed in the bill will simply lower costs and were proposed by Republicans. So, please stop with the signs that say "Government Keep its Hands off My Medicare." Its like saying that the Federal Government should stop running the U.S. Marine Corps. Without the Government, there wouldn't be a Medicare. Got it? Oh, and its MY TAXPAYER DOLLARS THAT PAYS FOR YOUR HEALTH CARE YOU DAMN HYPOCRITES!!!!!

The latest is Sarah Palin saying that Obama wants to kill her son Trig because he has Down's syndrome. Really? Really? How ridiculous is that? All this does, quite naturally, is stoke anger to the point where someone is going to get shot.

In this evironment, there's no way the GOP is going to go along with health insurance reform. Not only will the base not vote for the GOP, but at this point, the base might just shoot its leaders. Bipartisanship is nice, but you can't bargain with crazy. And we're looking at a lot of crazy here.

Last point - if there wasn't this level of craziness, and the Republican Party was willing to discuss how to reform health insurance (instead of saying everything is hunky-doory), then we could have an interesting debate as to how to fix health care in this country.