The Republicans seem to be aware that their obsession with killing the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, is unpopular and damaging to their party. Certainly, most everyone else is. Forty votes to repeal a healthcare overhaul based on a Republican healthcare overhaul and not a single jobs bill since 2008.
Former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), whom you might remember dropping out of politics in April to go into…a more lucrative, seven figure form of politics with the Heritage Foundation, told Newsmax TV yesterday that the GOP should be willing to destroy America if that is what it takes to get rid of medical care for the American people.
Interestingly, DeMint says Obamacare is more damaging to America “than anything I’ve seen pass in my lifetime.”
Obamacare apparently being more damaging than a Republican destruction of America itself. So what he is saying is that the GOP must be willing to do more damage to America than the most damaging thing they’ve seen so far, in order to stop the second-most damaging thing done to America.
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That’s like burning down your house to stop a leaky pipe from flooding your bathroom.
Yes, Jim DeMint is a lackwit and he thinks Americans are lackwits too. And he’s right about some of them. Those we call the Tea Party.
Listen to what he had to say to Newsmax:
The key to saving our country, to turning things around and really putting the government on the right track, is getting people informed, engaged all over the country. If Americans decide that they want to stop this unfair and unaffordable bill called Obamacare, they can do it, but the congressmen and senators themselves will not do it. They’ll not take that kind of risk unless the American people rise up and effectively tell them that’s what they want to do.
I’ve been to about 45 cities, meeting with a lot of advocates, a lot of tea party folks, independent groups, just talking about what we need to do as a people to turn our country around, but we’re going to focus on this Obamacare bill, which increasingly people know is unfair. Congress is getting special favors — big unions, big corporations are getting waivers, and it looks like it’s the little guy that’s going to get stuck with the bill.
People are getting notices that they’ll either lose their insurance or it’s going to cost more. We tell people that if the House passes a government funding bill that doesn’t include Obamacare, we can stop this bill in its tracks.
Oh, well, Tea Party folks…yeah, there’s a meaningful constituency. These are the people who hurled racist slurs against Obama recently in Arizona. These are the people who wave Confederate flags and send postcards of the White House surrounded by a watermelon patch. They hate Obamacare, DeMint says.
The problem is that they hate black people, even black people they themselves say are only “47 percent Negro.”
That’s Jim DeMint’s constituency at the Heritage Foundation. The problem isn’t Obamacare and it was never Obamacare. The problem for these crackers is that Obama is a black man in a big white house.
But DeMint, like his fellow bigots, tries to make it all about Obamacare and he has a problem with any Republican who thinks the cost of stopping Obamacare is too high, not only for the GOP but for America:
Since when do Americans not fight for what is right because they’re afraid they might lose?
We all know this is a terrible bill, and the more we learn about it the more we understand it’s going to hurt people, it’s going to hurt our country. This may be our last chance to stop it, and the only way to stop it when Republicans control only the House is to fund the government but not to include any funding for Obamacare.
Now if the president decides he’s not going to accept government funding and allows the government to shut down, then it’s going to become apparent that he’s letting the government shut down because he wants to save this failed bill.
So this is an argument that we can win with the American people. If we tell people the truth about the bill, more people are going to blame the president when all is said and done.
If Americans don’t see Republicans fighting for something they promised to fight for, that’s going to do much more damage than the risk of possibly taking on the president and not getting everything we want.
That’s actually kinda funny. The Republicans said they were going to fight for jobs too, but they’re too busy trying to repeal and defund Obamacare to create one single job for Americans. Too busy robbing women of the rights to their own bodies to create one single job for Americans. Too busy disenfranchising minority voters to create one single job for Americans.
These fiscally responsible clowns didn’t even keep their budget promises!
Yeah, we can see promises mean quite a bit to the Republican Party.
One of the primary things they were tasked to do is to stop Obamacare. That’s the issue we hope that Speaker [John] Boehner and Mitch McConnell will focus on right now — recognizing we made a promise to the American people to stop this very destructive bill. That’s what we need to do before it’s implemented in October.
If Obamacare is not worth fighting for and risking losing a battle for, I don’t think there is anything worth fighting for anymore. This bill will do more damage to America, hurt more people personally, than anything that I’ve seen pass in my lifetime.
Of course, none of this is true. Obamacare is helping Americans. But having invested so much in fear-mongering, the GOP can hardly take a step back now and say, “Ooops, we were wrong.”
No, they have doubled down on the rhetoric, getting louder as the evidence against their case grows, and they are willing – almost eager – to take America down with their party, as though to say, if we can’t have America, you won’t have it either.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
