Quote of the Week (With Update)

"I will bet you, for most of you, you go home in the next two weeks when your members of Congress are home, and you look them in the eye and you say, 'What is your positive replacement for Obamacare?' They will have zero answer.

"We are caught up right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we are negative and as long as we are vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don't have to learn anything."

- Newt Gingrich, speaking at the opening session of the Republican National Committee's summer meeting last Wednesday.

Interestingly, Gingrich has a long history of supporting the Health Care Individual Mandate - the centerpiece of Obamacare - and many other prominent Republicans also supported the Individual Mandate prior the the election of Barack Obama as president (e.g., Mitt Romney, Former Senator Jim Fucking DeMint, Senators Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley, Former Senator Dick Lugar, Bob Dole, Alan Simpson, Arlen Specter, Judd Gregg, and Kay Hutchison.

And no, I am not making that last part up - all of those Republicans were in favor of the Health Care Individual Mandate prior to the election of President Blackenstein.  In fact, Jim Fucking DeMint, in February 2007, actually stated on Fox News that what Romney did in Massachusetts (i.e., an individual health care mandate also known as Romneycare) should be enacted on a national level.  DeMint's exact quote:  "Well, that's something that I think we should do for the whole country."

What is Jim Fucking DeMint doing now?  Well, he recently resigned from the Senate to take over the Heritage Foundation, and is (ironically) using that position to lead the charge against Obamacare.  Indeed, the recent poll indicating that an attempt to gut Obamacare by way of a government shutdown would not hurt the GOP was the product of Heritage Action for America, a "sister organization" of the Heritage Foundation. Both these organizations are aggressively supporting a movement to defund Obamacare.

But the irony does not end there, because it turns out that the Heritage Foundation is the conservative think-tank that came up with the idea of the Individual Mandate in the first place.  You just can't make this shit up.

UPDATE:  As usual, I can't get enough of this:

Just when they seemed to have the situation under control, Republican leaders are facing the wrath of conservatives who are furious that the heads of the party aren’t interested in risking a government shutdown over Obamacare this fall.

Conservative anxieties over the Affordable Care Act are reaching a boil as the law’s major provisions are set to take effect in the coming months. And an all-out grassroots mobilization during the month-long August recess by wealthy right-leaning groups like FreedomWorks and Heritage Action appears to be having an impact. Republican lawmakers have said their constituents are demanding they hold the line.

“I’m hearing a lot of anger that is right beneath the surface, ready to erupt,” said veteran Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX), according to The Hill. Burgess, who has influence within his caucus on health policy, said the support for the defunding push was “virtually unanimous.” ***

I was never much of an Individual Mandate supporter. I've long thought that the best way to deal with the Health Care Crisis was to expand Medicare to cover everyone. But the beauty of Obama signing a health care reform bill featuring the Individual Mandate is that Republicans now lack a fall-back position.

Had Obama enacted the public option into law, the Republicans could have then proposed the individual mandate -- their own idea -- as a replacement for it.  But since Republicans have decided to oppose Obama on everything and have nowhere to go health care-wise, all they can do now is dress up like Founding Fathers and walk down the street pissing themselves while holding signs saying that Obama is a Fascist-Socialist-Kenyanist simply because he put into place what is essentially a market-oriented (i.e., conservative) solution to a very serious problem. 

Hilarious.