American Power And Death To Tyrants

My conservative counterpart Donald Douglas of American Power has posted the above wanted poster (Really, Don? Because he's a criminal, right? Jesus...) and quoted the following accusatory diatribe from another conservative blog in his post Sic Semper Tyrannis!:

WE THE PEOPLE "DEEM" that Barack Hussein Obama is an Enemy of this Constitutional Republic!! He has demonstrated clear disregard of Constitution and shown his disdain for the Rule of Law by indicating his willingness to sign the ObamaCare bill without a vote in the House on the Senate bill itself (a use of illegal and unConstitutional sleight-of-hand called "self-executing" "deem and pass") and by accepting a Senate "reconciliation" vote of only 51 Senators without opportunity of opposition filibuster. Obama has vigorously demanded that Congress to pass ObamaCare by "any means possible" even if such means are unConstitutional and against the Rule of Law. The White House is also invoking "The Chicago Way" to intimidate House members. Will House members be paid a "house call" by members of Obama's union friends? All thuggery all the time for Obama!! And all of this is happening under the backdrop that the American people, based on any poll you look at, OVERWHELMINGLY reject ObamaCare and the tactics used by this Administration to attempt to pass it!

The fact that he routinely posts hyperbolic bullshit like this is is one of the many reasons I make fun of the guy. First, as I've said before, a substantial percentage of the American people who "OVERWHELMINGLY reject ObamaCare" are liberals and independents who don't think that it does enough to reform our broken health care system and would like us to move further towards a universal system like that in every other major industrialized Western nation on the planet. They don't "reject ObamaCare", they just want it to be stronger and more comprehensive and the ideologues amongst them simply disapprove of the current watered down legislation.

Second, as I've also said before, polls show that the American people OVERWHELMINGLY support almost all of the provisions in the reform bill whilst simultaneously opposing the bill itself, proving that Americans are kind of dumb sometimes and are susceptible to the constant media cacophony decrying the bill most of the time. They like pretty much everything in this bill, they just don't know what most of it is and have a negative view of it because a year of watching partisan Washington wrangling will cast any piece of legislation in a negative light.

Third, as I've also also said before, the "tactics used by this Administration to attempt to pass it" are no different than those used by past administrations both Democratic and Republican to pass a myriad of legislation over the years. The only difference is that today we have so many 24 hour news channels and websites constantly discussing and reporting on these same procedures that they can now be successfully framed as some sort of inside the beltway, back room deal to the American people. Just as they did with fiscal conservatism, Republicans have suddenly found religion when it comes to legislative procedure and this Road to Damascus moment comes just as coincidentally when they are now out of power. Remember John Boehner passing out tobacco lobby checks on the House floor just before a vote on legislation regulating that industry just one year into the Republicans' vaunted Contract with America? I do. And do you also remember the subsequent Republican outcry about ethics and constitutionality that followed? Yeah, neither do I. Plus, polls show that the American people really don't care that much about Washingtonian tactics as much as they care about the results of said tactics. Most of them aren't political junkies, they just want responsible governance from their elected leaders.

And lastly, those aforementioned tactics aren't "unConstitutional" as the right likes to constantly bellow. The Democrats are using established and legal congressional rules and procedures to pass this legislation. To wit, I am now going to make two predictions about the future of the health care reform bill: 1) someone on the right will sue the federal government under the guise that the procedures used to pass this legislation (if, Buddha willing, it does pass, ) were unconstitutional and 2) the Supreme Court will either refuse to hear the case or will summarily rule against them. Granted, this won't cause so-called conservatives like Don to stop their crying and whining about the "tyranny" of President Obama and his efforts to reform the American health care system but it will give the rest of us ample justification for laughing at them. Ex idiota, comoedia!