The Grinch is GOP!

by Dennis Green

Well, we’re getting some kind of health care reform, which many Americans may like very much. It limits how much insurance companies can spend on “overhead” such as marketing and high salaries; it prevents people being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions; and it adds about 25 million Americans to the system. No thanks to the Republicans.

They bleat that President Obama’s approval rating has dropped below 50%, but it’s still far more than double theirs, which holds at 17%. And they have gambled on a very risky strategy: that Obama’s policies would fail to pass at all, or if they do that they will disappoint a majority of the voters in the upcoming midterms of 2010. Fat chance.

Meanwhile, not a viable candidate on the right in sight. Huckabee’s pardon of a vicious, unredeemed murderous thug cancels out his chances. And Sarah’s “misapprehensions,” (i.e., outright lies), pile up around her like a deep snowdrift. Death panels indeed. They’re meeting in the airline hanger of her bus tour even now.

The head of the GOP says that Democrats have just “Flipped the finger to the American public” by passing this bill. And such rhetoric reveals a mindset that may be, unfortunately, typical of his party. They mistake their own chronic chthonic view of life as the spirit of the American people.

And yes, Big Money controls the U.S. Congress, but every single Republican is bought and paid for, and only a majority of Democrats, perhaps 200 in the House and 40 in the Senate. There are still a few “Non-Corporate Democrats” left, and they voted for this bill rather than leaving 47 million Americans out in the cold.

So now the waiting, and the observing, and the carping begin. But if, nine months from now, a majority of Americans like what they see, the GOP will be forever a minority party, out of office and out of the running. The reasons for this are many.

They have lost the support of genuine fiscal conservatives by driving up the deficit during the last administration. They have lost the support of libertarians by catering to the religious right, which wants MORE government interference in our private lives and decision-making, not less. From abortion rights to gay rights to the civil rights of legal immigrants, the religious right wants Americans to be less free, not more free, of Big Brother, or is that Father McCoughlin?

And now they have chosen the strategy of Obstructionism to try and create gridlock in the Congress and block any progress by a president whose election makes them positively apoplectic. But they forget that such a strategy used by Democrats against President Ronald Reagan failed miserably and made him an American icon, prompting Spiro Agnew to call them “the nattering nabobs of negativity.”

Being a nattering nabob of negativity is just as silly, as burlesque, as it sounds. For Republicans, it’s like dressing up in black face and putting on a minstrel show to present an alternative to voters who have elected a black president. They need to remember the fate of the Grinch, and I don’t mean Newt.

©2009 Dennis Green