Vegacura: Rationing mental health care

I won't really speculate on whether the narrative arc of the long and at times painful "debate" over health care, and more specifically the administration's attempts to forge "bipartisan" agreement, were accidents, mistakes, or an artfully planned set of flanking maneuvers. Well, if I were to speculate, I'd say a combination of all three.

But regardless how we got here, it is encouraging to see that the administration and the leaders of the party are beginning to publicly say that they will push through health care reform through a party line vote if need be. While Obama had to sail the waters of accommodation in order to get the Broder types and other wise men of the Washington media to give him some credit for trying, it had to be clear to him from nearly the beginning that bipartisanship is dead. There was a time when monumental legislation not only could engage bipartisan support, it was a requirement for getting passage of something like the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights era legislation. That was a time when there was still a relatively large faction of moderate Republicans and a similarly large faction of racist southern Democrats. For civil rights legislation to pass, it required the support of the former to overcome the opposition of the latter. Since then the Republicans have been purged of all but a few moderates and the Democrats have been purged of their own embarrassing remnants of Jim Crow Democrats (most of whom merely changed parties).

In recent years, something like Bush's education reform initiatives passed with relatively substantial bipartisan support because Democrats actually support efforts for the government to improve things. On the flip side, Republicans -- in disgrace and with Obama in the White House -- become nihilists, led by liars.

So saith -- and linkith -- Roy:

The sort of thing that's going on now with the right is different in one regard: imputations against Obama of alien ideology -- commie, Nazi, whatever -- aren't coming exclusively from the cheap seats (though there's plenty of that). Representative Michele Bachmann talks about re-education camps. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich talk about Obama as a euthanasiast. Congressman Paul Braun says Obama's planned expansion of federal volunteer groups like the Peace Corps is "exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did." Republican National Committee leaders tried to get Chairman Steele to escalate his denigration of Democratic policies from "collectivist" to "socialist" -- and he finally got the message. Jeb Bush says he doesn't know whether Obama is a socialist. Senator Jim DeMint says, "we’re about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy." Etc.

This isn't Code Pink -- this is Republican political leadership. They're endorsing the idea that the policies of the duly elected government are not just wrong, but fundamentally illegitimate. That's why I'm disinclined to parse the funding and provenance of the tea parties and health care town halls -- what difference does it make how much FreedomWorks has to do with these eruptions when the leaders of the opposition have already declared Obama, in effect, a foreign agent?

The real danger is not violence but political dementia. The default if not official position of the opposition is that the party in power is literally the enemy of the American way of life. This also soaks up the birther, Obama-is-a-Muslim, and other cults born of a desire to negate the results of the last election. The guys who think Obama was born in Kenya may not get their citizen grand juries credentialed, but they have the comfort of knowing that their comrades don't acknowledge Obama as a real American President, either.