Granted, the healthcare reform bill is an improvement, at least for the poor Republican welfare states of the South (and they're 'real' Americans too!), but, as I've said before, this is a conservative, not centrist, healthcare plan. Brad DeLong:
...the essence of the reform -- which is that the insurance market has been restructured to remove those adverse-selection and moral-hazard problems that have broken our private insurance-based health-financing system....
The conservative DNA of ObamaCare is hardly a secret. "The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan," Frum wrote. "It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994."
But what DeLong writes next is the perfect retort to faux-liberal Peter Beinert's latest DLC scrawlings:
Over in that alternative branch of the quantum-mechanical multiverse in which Mitt Romney was elected President in November 2008, this health care bill--with much smaller subsidies and no tax increases on the rich, and with other tweaks and modifications--passed the House of Representatives 352-83 and passed the Senate 79-20, with near-solid Republican support. Left-wing Democrats whined that it was not real reform. The David Broders and David Brookses of the world trumpeted it as an extraordinary victory for American bipartisanship.Instead, we are here -- where a nearly identical plan appears very, very different.
This should indicate just how nutty bonkers the Republican right and conservative movement have become: they think passing a plan similar to Romneycare, to a Heritage Foundation plan, to the plan proposed by Bob Dole in 1994, is the cold, dead hand of socialism.
I wrote should because our media betters won't dare point this out: that would be unbalanced.
Which is a sign of just how unbalanced our political discourse has become.
And if it makes Republicans feel any better, a lot of middle class families--although fewer than before--will still be unable to afford medical care.
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Assuming the source is legit (see note at end), here's more proof about how unbalanced things are:
* 67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.
* 57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim
* 45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president"
* 38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did"
* Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama "may be the Antichrist."
Source is a new harris poll discussed at www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-22/scary-new-gop-poll/
However, the author chose not to cite the actual poll and my brief searching didn't turn it up. So its possible things are just being made up.
Politics reminds me of some of the peewee baseball leagues. Some kids bat with the ball set on a tee and other kids swing at a pitch. But all the hits count the same. The GOP gets to bat off a tee.
A certain GOP politician can't spell potato and the right has a hissy fit when is was mentioned. He was supposed to get a 'good-ol-boy' pass and get credit for trying. A liberal politician correctly uses the words and structure of the English language and he is called "articulate" and sneered at for being "uppity", "elitist" and "overly cerebral".
Makes me think that the GOP is the short-bus version of effective political leadership. No wonder they feel the need to stop all progress, no matter how needed or necessary it might be for the good of the nation. Democrats start getting things done and showing that government and the nation can function and the GOP loses their main talking point.
Worse than that the ability to lead and govern has atrophied to the point they simply can't govern effectively. Eight years of W showed that if you let them drive the nation will end up in the ditch.
JohnV,
I saw a post about that poll myself. I think that to get those high numbers, they included people who believed those things along with people who were "not sure."
IOW, the numbers are still a bit scary, but it's the fact that they are entertaining the idea that the statements might be right, not necessarily that they actually believe them.
Thanks for the Bob Dole mention; I thought he had played a round of healthcare reform back in his day, but I am too lazy to look it up.