The Republicans have fueled opposition to healthcare reform by trying to portray it as "socialized medicine" and a "government takeover." They have been trying to protract this battle long enough to get it through to November, so they could use it as a wedge issue along with all the lies they have told about it. When this bill has been passed into law, the American public will realize that we have indeed NOT become a communist state. They will realize that the deficit has NOT suddenly soared to stratospheric proportions like the Republicans mendaciously claim. When the truth comes out, your lies will come back to bite you in the ass, and you will look like fools among yourselves, among your families and among your countrymen. You will lose every bit of political traction you have. Your cause will die. It will be stampeded by a wave of progress the like of which has never been seen. You will lose everything because you chose to cross the line into deceit. What is due to you will come to pass. We may be a center-right society according to ideology, but we are not a society that has a tolerance for politicians who lead us into their agenda through lies and deceit. We would rather live under pure communism than be led by men and women who lie to us in order to get us there. The Republican Party has dug its own grave!
There's another possibility - that once Americans find out this isn't actually socialized medicine, that it doesn't have the benefits of socialized medicine, they will feel as betrayed by the Dems as by the Reps. They have bought the picture of what it is, and experience warns us that no large fraction of them will remember, in six months, who said what about it, or how they came to believe what they believe.
Seriously? Do you know how many times that's been said about either of the parties? After Obama and the Democrats won this past election, I kept hearing about how the Republican party is now defunct. Similar things were said about the American left after Bush II's election. We're stuck with the crappy two-party system for the foreseeable future. The conservative segment of the population who hate this bill will not change their mind, not matter HOW much good it does. The only risk, here, is for the Democratic party (and, consequently, the greatest opportunity). I'll believe the "dug its own grave" bit when I see it. Until then, that's just rhetorical posturing. ~String
HAH! The Republicans lost in 2008 because of their mendacity. When the truth came out, when Americans had had time to really sort out what was really going on, there was a backlash. It wasn't because the Republicans were more conservative than the American public was happy with, but it was because of their mendacity, because of the smoke and mirrors that characterized the Rove/Bush era, because of the nastiness of Limbaugh, of all of the other pundits who had this winning formula, unadulterated spite, for short-term victory. They excited a tiny fraction of the population to cheerfully canvass and slave for them with unprecedented enthusiasm for no reason OTHER than the fact that they got off on the nastiness and the spite of Rove/Bush era politics. For a few hours of their day, they could get some cheap thrills. But it was a house of cards! In 2008 it came tumbling down. If the Republicans create another such atmosphere that is based on nothing in the world but spite, the wish to destroy and stampede just for the cheap thrill of it, which is really all that motivates the tea partiers in their behavior, they will only finish putting themselves in the grave by 2016. The Republicans might be able to rescue some seats in government if they choose to go back to their roots, to go back to appealing to the bourgeoisie, that might gain them something that counts in the long-term. Otherwise, the Democrats will claim this territory as well, and the Republicans will become nothing more than the party of thuggery, of the surviving dregs of racism and of homophobia, of people who are desperate to create a government based on religious despotism, and they will be haunted by their mistakes.
