You’ve got to be kidding me. Health care, still? Haven’t you all tired of this “debate” yet? The Supreme Court has deliberated and spoken. The non-starter question of Constitutionality has been answered. The Anti-Health Care Republican Crusade should be over, folks.
That Romney continues to wave the health care flag at his constituents is ludicrous. We all get that, by doing so, he only offers them yet another of his now-famous hypocritical “flip-flops”. I take the liberty of assumption here in presuming that everyone knows that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was based upon Romney’s successful rollout of his plan as governor in Massachusetts. Shoot. He even supported the individual mandate – you know, that portion of the bill to which his loyal rightists are most opposed and of which even the Supreme Court did not uphold. Yet, he continues to fly on his “repeal and replace” jet, completely indifferent to the noxious fumes he blows along the way.
Really, I think Obama could just sit back and ride the remainder of this campaign season out without saying another word – that is if we could be assured of a critically minded public not requiring a detailed debriefing of Romney’s incongruities be. Or, the guarantee of a society not so logically bereft that the incompatibilities of the so-called argument fail them, despite our patient explanation. It is absurd, to say the least, that we should be tasked with re-explaining the explanation of the Supreme Court’s justified ruling. (I, personally, find it to be incomprehensible that one shouldn’t understand the comprehensibility of comprehensive health care in the first place.)
The greater inanity of the Republican stance on this now non-starter is that they seem to miss that Romney’s intent is to “repeal and replace” the existing mandate. That he intends to put forth another plan should have that party completely out-of-whack and peeved as all heck! If they are opposed to the entire idea, why do they support a guy that intends to put forth another version of the same thing? Talk about flip-flopping. I get the excuse that this shouldn’t be a federal matter but, rather, a state one (as they have simultaneously attempted to make abortion – another health care consideration – a federal issue), but now that they’ve taken it to the Supreme Court of the United States, it’s a federal done-deal. As president, Romney could only put out another federal health care plan, to which Republicans are supposedly opposed.
I’m really trying to understand my apparent misunderstanding of this whole thing. Romney wants to repeal the health care plan that was based on his own health care plan and replace it with his own (yet to be revealed) health care plan, which isn’t his original health care plan but will be a new health care plan. And, despite Republicans being opposed to any health care plan, they will support Romney’s health care plan. Repeal and replace. Gotcha.
This repeal and replace thing is actually a perfect example of typical-to-Republicans regressive behavior in politics. Were every incoming president to repeal and replace every policy the previous dude had put into place, we would still be living in the all-glorious and much revered days of our beginnings; haulin’ around muskets to hunt muskrats. (Learnin’ curve? We don’t need no damn learnin’ curve!) If Romney is elected, we can just erase the progress made over Obama’s term and return to the splendor of the Bush years.
I understand the implausibility of voting for the lesser of the two evils. Hoever, when a person’s “lesser” is the very one who brought about the one thing that is most loathed about the other’s policies, I’ve got to question that person’s capacity for reason. This conflagration of rational thought lends perfectly to the pretext that “group-think” is dangerous: Once an erroneous conclusion, based on faulty logic, is put to the non-thinking audience of our public as accurate and realistic, it is passed along as valid and true. Despite that one can’t rework the invalidity of a thing that is inherently invalid, it remains somehow acceptable because every TomTom, Joe and Harry say it is so.
The Republicans have gotten themselves into quite a bind on this one. Having screamed in opposition over health care from the get-go in such a declarative fashion, they find that backing down from their disgruntled perch is an impossibility. They are hell-bent that they are in the “right” (and they’re a pride-full bunch, to be sure) and there ain’t no a-stoppin’ ‘em now. (Hmm. This is kind of reminiscent of the ongoing Birth Certificate Conspiracy.) Catty and vindictive sons-o-guns will go about it every which preposterous way to prove their correctness despite being deemed incorrect by the highest court tasked with deciding that which is correct. As a good friend has previously said to me, “You can’t reason with the unreasonable.”
I look forward to sitting this dance out. I mean, the music did stop playing some time ago and I could sure use a breather and a sip of some refreshment. Never mind that the Republicans are still doing the boogie to that same drab tuneless jig playing in their group-thinkin’ minds. I look forward to hearing all about Romney’s to-be-unveiled alternative health care plan with which he plans to replace the current to-be-repealed one. And, to listening for the forthcoming Republican justification for supporting that which they inherently do not support. Of course, I may be left waiting for a while – Romney will likely put that one off for just as long an undefined period as he has been with revealing his past taxes. (I wonder that Republicans don’t perceive the irony of that one either, but that’s another topic entirely.)
In the meantime, I will try to adopt passive passivity and give way to the idea that my explaining the explanation of my confusion is confusing. I must know by now that there is no making sense of the nonsensical, much less in comprehending the incomprehensible.
