Pass Healthcare Reform So the Republicans Can Repeal It

It’s not often that I get the urge to give advice to the loyal opposition. For one thing, they are so obnoxiously disloyal, not merely as a matter of conviction, or even emotional gut revulsion at policies they dislike, but strictly from a coldly calculated tactical decision to derail the smooth workings of the government for their own political gain.

They’ve decided to gum up the national works and blame it on the Democrats.

They propose no alternatives to Democratic initiatives: their alternative is NO. Whatever it is, as Groucho Marx sang in the movie Horsefeathers, they’re against it.

On health care reform the tactic has come dangerously close to working. The longer the apparently interminable debate has dragged on, the lower support for reform drops in the polls. The present system is in trouble, it has to be changed now or the country will suffer, and the Republicans have decided to let the country suffer in order to see the Democrats fail.

Why offer help to people who are this creepy, and who seem to be getting what they want by being creepy?

I don’t know. They come up with such interestingly perverse reactions to reality that I have an almost irresistible urge to sign up as their life coach. I think, “These people really need help, but exactly how could anybody go about helping them?” It would be like trying to push someone’s buttons whose buttons are hooked up to an inner circuitry designed by Rube Goldberg.

For example, at the same time that they’re doing their calculating Richard Nixon machinations to get what they want no matter what the consequences, they retain a blissfully childlike belief in ideological notions that threaten all the fruit of their cold calculations. It’s a weird combination of ruthless effectiveness and bumbling naivete.

It leads them to repeatedly oppose any government action, based solely on the all-American fear of having the government do anything, even when it’s pretty clear, to even a slightly objective observer, that the government action is going to end up being wildly popular.

What political mileage does the Republican Party possibly get out of wanting to privatize Social Security, for example? None, nada. Will they ever drop this notion that most people realized was stupid somewhere around 1943? No, never, because to do so would be to deny the fairy tale of inevitable government fallibility.

So, yes, the Republicans are smart to oppose healthcare reform, and oppose it to the hilt. People are scared of hospitals, they don’t want to die, they don’t like the present system, but they’re even more nervous about any changes that involve the government. The longer you draw out the process of change, as the Republicans are doing, the less likely it is that change will happen, and the more likely people will be to blame the Democrats for not achieving the change they need and want and fear all at once. Perfect tactic for where we’re at right now.

But what do you do if healthcare reform passes? There’s a bunch of really smart Republican politicians, including Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, who say that if reform passes this month, the party should back repeal in November.

Who knows? In the fall of 2010, before reform is really in place, that might well work. But if healthcare reform is still in effect in 2016, the Republicans might as well back the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill, Medicare, Social Security as well. There’s a whole bunch of good ideas initially opposed by Republicans that the wisest among them have eventually embraced. That’s how a black man became head of the Republican National Committee.

If healthcare reform passes and people actually have enough experience of it by the fall to actually like it, the Republicans would be nuts to run on repeal. Party principles are useful to guide a political movement, rally the faithful, and even attract the undecided. It’s important to have an idea of where you want to go.

But the Buddhists have a principle for personal enlightenment that I think can also be valuable for mass political movements, particularly ones as dysfunctional as the Republican Party: don’t believe everything you think.

The New Yippies

“The Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control. And truly patriotic Americans like you and our Republican Party are the only thing standing in their way.”

Jesus, who wrote this stuff? It’s from a fundraising letter attributed to Michael S. Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and sent out with his signature immediately following the announcement that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but I’ve heard Steele interviewed and am certain he’s incapable of producing language this maniacally grandiose and paranoid.

Pronouncements like this come out of the mouths of melodramatic strongmen haranguing the crowd from a balcony in a banana republic; Steele in the interview I heard sounded more like a petty bureaucrat.

I haven’t heard material like this since I my kids and I used to watch Pinky and the Brain, the latter a cartoon mouse with an enormous cranium and a dream of taking over the world. The style is not quite Joe McCarthy; the tail-gunner from Wisconsin had a more working-class, thuggish feel to his rants. Nixon was as paranoid in his style, but more personal; he wasn’t as obsessed with the international plot for global control as he was with the international plot to get Dick Nixon.

No, I think whoever wrote this was channeling Terry Southern, the genius who co-wrote Dr. Strangelove. This is Colonel Jack D. Ripper, barricaded in his office, clutching his machine gun, chomping on his cigar and laying out with utter conviction the Communist conspiracy to drain our precious bodily fluids. What the hell is “global redistribution and control” anyway? What do the international leftists want to redistribute and control? Our wealth? Our minds? Our guns? Our semen?

All of the above, or none of the above, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling, the fear, the anger. We want people to give money to stop the fear. This material is florid, desperate, and interesting, I suppose, because it’s so emotional.

So was Jonestown. I don’t know about you, but this new, cultish Republican Party makes me nervous. These intense lunatics are certainly more fun to watch than Eisenhower or John Foster Dulles, but I really was more comfortable with the Republicans when they resembled the board of directors of a bank more than they did the Yippies.

Big Lie, Little Facts, Bigger Truths

I feel isolated by my problem with lies. No one seems to care about lies, particularly lies by politicians. People expect lies from politicans, and fall back on reliance on what John Feehery, a Republican strategist, recently referred to as "the bigger truths."

Quoted in the Washington Post, Feeherty said, "The more the New York Times and the Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent. As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

The bigger truths outweigh the little facts, particularly when they will put your candidate in office. 

Of course, bigger truths in most people's moral universe are arrived at by examining all "those little facts" closely and arriving at conclusions based on those facts.

For example, since most people had never heard of Sarah Palin three weeks ago, most people conclude, as Feeherty does, that she is new. Similarly, when we look at Alaskan opinion polls with high ratings of Palin's performance as governor, most of us also agree that she is popular in Alaska.

When, however, we look at the fact that she did not, as the Republicans claimed, stop the Bridge to Nowhere, and that rather than battling such projects she was an avid promoter of $200 million in earmarked pork for Alaska, most of us would not agree with Feeherty that she could by any contortion of the truth be called an "insurgent."

In the matter of Palin's "insurgency," the Republicans respected the traditional connection between little facts and big truth only so far as they realized that they would have to make all the little facts lead to the bigger truth they desired to put in the heads of the voters.

So they made them up.

But obviously, for  Feeherty and for McCain and for the vast majority of most Republicans in the country this election season,  a "big truth" is not actually certified on the basis of the little facts, but by how far and wide you can disseminate it before the fact checkers get to it.

Spread the big truth wide enough fast enough, and the little facts become irrelevant. Once you get the desired big truth "out there," as Feeherty explains, the case is closed. To hell with the little facts.

Obviously, the big truth is simply the flip side of Goebbels' big lie. 

Most people in print are even more squeamish about comparing Republicans to Nazis than they are about calling them liars.

Maybe they're right to be squeamish. These people are only doing what politicians commonly do to get elected.

When you consider how many people have died for fairy tales like the weapons of mass destruction, though, you start to miss the application of morals to politics.

The Revenge of the Nerds

It never surprised me to learn that Karl Rove was a high school debater. As a former debater myself, I am very familiar with the syndrome. These were the guys who, like Rove, walked into debate rounds with briefcases full of blank evidence cards, just to intimidate the opposition.

These were the guys who, in the first round of their first tournaments, peed in their pants from self-conscious stage fright and who, by about their fourth tournament, had developed into full-blown humiliation monsters ("I don't pee in my pants, I make the other guy pee in his!") They became masters at making their opponents look like brainless, mumbling, incompetent fools, and won a lot of debate tournaments doing so.

These were the acne-faced, pudgy, bespectacled, sexually frustrated, super smart, sophomoric nerds who became acne-faced, pudgy, bespectacled, sexually frustrated, super smart, senior presidential advisory nerds (doing the bidding of the nasty little bullies who, like George Bush, spent their childhoods blowing up frogs with cherry bombs).

I have come to believe that the entire Republican Party has transformed itself into the refuge of socially and psychologically crippled geeks and bullies who are too maladjusted to function anywhere but in a club of equally dysfunctional geeks and bullies.

Consider David Addington, for example. Chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Addington is often referred to as "Cheney's Cheney." New Yorker writer Jane Mayer has reported in the magazine that Addington was centrally involved in formulating the Bush adminstration's policies on treatment of detainees that resulted in U.S. forces engaging in torture on a systematic basis.

Mayer reported that Leonard Napolitano, a close friend of Addington in high school, described himself and Addington as "nerds."

"Addington stood out for wearing black socks with shorts. He and his friends were not particularly athletic, and they liked to play poker all night on weekends, stopping early in the morning for breakfast. Their circle included some girls, until the boys found them 'too distracting to our interest in cards,' Napolitano recalled."

Irwin Hoffman, Addington's history teacher, told Mayer that Addington "had a very strong sarcastic streak. He was scornful of anyone who said anything that was naïve, or less than bright. His sneers were almost palpable."

Sound a bit like Karl Rove? Consider Rove's recent attempt to label Barack Obama: "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

The projection is obvious ("makes snide comments about everyone") but the resentment and envy of a nerd who never had a "beautiful date" is even more striking.

Year after year, election after election, Republican administration after administration, the whole country has had to pay because social cripples like Rove and Addington were never able to get over high school. They take out their revenge on all of us.

The democratic process is repeatedly subjected to versions of the overstuffed debate briefcase trick. It's one sophomoric dirty trick after another. Democrats get Willie Hortoned, and Frenchified, and Swift Boated year after year by psychologically twisted gnomes who consider elections nothing more than primitive machines easily manipulated to win power.

The democratic process is jiggered to protect rich people's money and, more importantly it seems, fulfill the nerds' own need to show the suave, sophisticated, sexually satisfied high school Caesars who didn't even know the debate team existed how powerful a nerd can really be.

This is why I am sitting through these guys sniggering at Barack Obama for being successful (meaning "uppity") and lying about his energy policy to make him look incompetent (the nifty tire gauge gambit—as if Obama wouldn't easily be able to prove they are lying and make a pretty effective joke of it) and sticking him in an ad with beautiful white blondes Paris Hilton and Britney Spears (the miscegenation visual—a harder bullet for even some one as smooth as Obama to duck).

This is why I have to sit through these guys trying to use this bullshit to hold back the flood of reality that is driving this election—the real gas prices, and the real food inflation, and the real housing collapse, and the real global warming, and the real wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real strategic collapse of U.S. foreign policy—and that John McCain is having a hard time trying to put out of people's minds.

McCain has got a couple of percentage points out of this baloney, and it certainly is his best hope for winning, and he and the geeks could actually pull the whole thing out of the hat one more time.

But if the geeks get their man in again they will have to govern in a reality growing so much more insistently real that no amount of sophomoric bullshit will ever cover it up.