Extremist ‘Tea Party’ Republicans like to pretend they are patriots — so much so that when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) complained this week that the government shutdown he helped engineer had forced the elimination of Veteran’s Administration healthcare services, he belatedly discovered that he had painted himself into an impossible corner.
Well, he didn’t discover it on his own. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) helped him to notice that he was ardently advocating on the Senate floor for the Veteran’s Administration health care system, which, unlike “ObamaCare”, is an actual government run healthcare system of the type that Cruz pretends to abhor so much he was willing to lead his party to shutting down the entire government to block it.
“I just wanted to be clear,” Stabenow asked Cruz during his floor speech advocating re-opening the VA as part of the GOP’s desperate effort to re-open only those parts of government they approve, “Because the Senator from Texas has, in fact, made the ending of a private sector, competitive health care system for up to 30 million Americans part of what he wants to stop. I just wanted to be clear that the fully government-funded, government-run — with government doctors — system through the Veteran’s Administration system is something that you are advocating we continue to fund through the federal government?”
Cruz couldn’t say much more in response than: “The answer is yes. I believe we should fully fund the VA.” (Full video here.)
Unlike “Obamacare”, a private health insurance operation merely overseen by the government, the VA healthcare system that Cruz was advocating for, actually is a full-blown, government-run healthcare system. Or, as the heroic Republicans now like to deride it: A government takeover of healthcare!
Actual heroes, on the other hand, like Redge Ranyard, who fought against Nazis during World War II, are less than impressed by the claims made by Republicans like Cruz and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) that they are locked in an “epic battle” to save the nation…
Turd Crud and his ilk, to them self awareness, like hypocrisy or shame, is elusive.
Must come with the greed gene which is in abundance with these effers.
They remind me of spoiled children.
Ernie pointed out:
I have read in military journals about their innate confusion about health care:
(quoting Nat. Def. Mag.). They also seem to be confused about “government” because one of their famous quips is to make government small enough “to drown in a bathtub.” (ibid). Seems like Floridiot has it down pat.
Okay, Sen. Cruz. I’m game. How about free VA, government-run, healthcare for everyone!
Offer that and I’m sure progressives will readily agree to a repeal of ObamaCare.
This whole government shutdown/fiscal cliff (part 10) is a fault of many structural problems with our government, but to me the main problem is that it is because we have a two party system. If we had a multi-party system and one party decided it wanted to go off the edge and try to destroy the government, the other parties would just ignore them, re-organize the government to quarantine the ridiculousness and allow the government to continue. Since we only allow/take seriously only two parites and one of them has decided to go off the deep end our government has fallen into disfunction even though the party causing the disfunction has only limited power in the system. We need to repeal any laws that limit the number of parties and how a party is able to gain relevance.
Alex –
To be clear, I don’t care for the two-party duopoly any more than you do. Though I’m not sure we can blame that, specifically, for the current idiocy in Congress. In fact, that fact that one party is now, essentially, cut into two (crazy extremist RWers & moderately less crazy RWers who are acceding to the former’s demands here) would seem to underscore the probs that would be inherent in a more multi-party system.
The other side of the argument, of course (yours, here), is that in such a case, the Less-Crazy Party might be willing to more easily abandon the Extremist-Crazy Party. But, in doing so, they’d also be marginalizing themselves at the same time.
So, again, not sure that the duopoly is the problem in this particular case, but I’m open to more explanation of your theory.
You also said…
There are no such “laws” to my knowledge, even though the system is obviously built by the two major parties in ways that tend to benefit the two major parties. Much of that benefit, however, is merely built in the minds of Americans (reinforced regularly by the corporate media) who are told that 3rd Parties can’t win, etc. That’s absurd, of course (just ask Jesse Ventura), but still, Americans have been led to believe that they will get a prize if they pick the winner in an election, so voting for a third party, somehow, is a “wasted” vote. Absurd, of course, but the conventional wisdom on that point is very difficult to combat, unfortunately.