I’m on a break from a conference I’m at all week, so I’m following the news on Twitter.
Looks like there is a “done deal” which achieves little for the American people or the future of the nation. The monstrosity known as Obamacare remains in place and the national debt keeps growing toward oblivion.
I’m glad some people tried to stop both.
At least some Republicans are on record as being willing to do just about anything to stop Obamacare although not as much as Obama and Democrats were willing to do to save it. If there were hostage-takers and suicide bombers, they weren’t Ted Cruz and Mike Lee or the conservatives in the House.
Fact is, Obamacare is so precious to Obama that he would have, in his words, thrown the country into default rather than make changes everyone knows are needed.
That the Democrats have succeeded in portraying those who wanted to help Americans as terrorists is a testament to Democrats’ ability to synchronize messaging, a sympathetic and lazy media, back-stabbing and weak Republicans, and a failure of will.
I’m convinced that as time goes on, those who fought the good fight will be vindicated. Stand with them as the long-knives come out.
There will be some spiking of the football by Obama supporters. So what else is new.
There also will be I-told-you-so’s from some Republicans. I care even less about that.
Move on to the next fights.
At most this is a passing victory for two failed ideologies, neither of which holds much hope for the future.
Update: Wow, Brit Hume may be the only mainstream commentator who understands why there was at least an attempt to defund Obamacare and hold the line on the national debt (via Ace):
“In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left.Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew.And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy.They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan.They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they’ll try anything to bring that about.
Update No. 2: I’ll probably have more on this later, but since I’m tight for time, here’s an excerpt from an excellent post by Keith Koffler at White House Dossier, The Tea Party is Both Sensible and Victorious:
The muttering class Inside the Beltway is very pleased with itself: The doomed Tea Party strategy is foundering on the shoals of idiocy, just like they said it would. The Republican “brand” has been downgraded yet again. America is looks foolish abroad: “The world has reacted mostly with disbelief that a superpower could fall into such dysfunction,” wrote the New York Times today. Reasonable people will soon be back in charge so they can do reasonable things in a reasonable way without all these Tea Party lunatics stirring up trouble.Let me tell all of you something:THIS COUNTRY IS ALREADY IN A STATE OF TOTAL DYSFUNCTION, AND HAS BEEN FOR YEARS.A state of dysfunction, mind you, brought to you by the “reasonable” people who have been striking deals for years that have created $17 trillion in debt and a possibly irreversible degree of Socialism that is lobotomizing our tradition of independent thinking and creativity, crippling free enterprise, and carving the soul out of the moral, God-fearing ethic that has made this nation the greatest on earth.You’ll see them all on the Sunday talk shows, concurring solemnly with each other about the need to avoid such shenanigans again so our system can resume functioning in a normal manner.But as you and I know, “normal” has become a state of somnolence in which our leaders steadily sleepwalk us into the abyss.
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