They fought until the bitter end. Opponents of health reform spent the first year of the Obama administration fighting tooth and nail to derail him and kill it, demonizing everyone and everything in their path.
It inspired the birth of the Tea Party activists, a group of angry and confused citizens who had bought hook, line and sinker into the fear tactics purchased for millions by insurance companies, and sold by faux grass roots organizations they funded.
Reposted from Pointing Fingers
Throughout the summer of 2009, raucous town hall meetings dominated the political landscape.
Images of bureaucrats on "death panels" banging gavels and dispensing death sentences on grandma were perpetuated by everyone from Sarah Palin, dragging around her child with Down’s Syndrome like a cheap prop, to turncoats in the senate, like Chuck Grassley, who lied to Obama that he would work to secure bipartisan legislation, while telling his constituents he wouldn’t, YouTube be damned.
Hungry for blood, the racism was just as unconcealed as the weapons activists waved around dangerously at town halls where the President spoke, chillingly calling for the blood of patriots to water the tree of liberty. Protests decrying the rise of a fascist/socialist/communist caricature of the Obama administration and Obama Care threatened to annihilate the First and Second Amendment with the fervor of the New York Police Department at a Republican convention in 2004.
Caricatures of the President as Hitler and the Joker depicted him as a fascist, socialist and witch doctor who murdered unborn children and grandmothers with equal disdain. Intelligence was equated with elitism while ignorance and stupidity were hailed as patriotic.
Orly Taitz – an unhinged lawyer/dentist and leading figure for the quickly discredited "birther" movement challenged the President’s citizenship, claiming Obama is an Islamo-fascist sympathizer and that that Fox News is partly owned by Saudi Arabia. (And is, no doubt, a proponent of tort reform, having only been personally involved in 22 lawsuits in Orange County civil court, and been charged frequently with judicial and ethical misconduct in her capacity as an attorney in federal court and with the California Bar Association).
Aligning themselves with Ms. Taitz included Senator Jim Inhofe, Rep. Bill Posey, Rep. Mary Bono Mack, Rep. John Campbell, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, and Rep. John Culberson.
Republicans lost in a sea of moral hypocrisy, led by the cartoonish RNC Chair, Michael Steele, a fey and ineffective Mitch McConnell in the Senate, and the giggly trio of John Boehner, Eric Canter and John Cornyn in the House of Representatives, turned to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin to define not just healthcare, but themselves and their party.
During the President’s State of the Union address in January, an unknown congressman named Joe Wilson screamed "You lie" after the president stated that illegal immigrants would not be provided for in the health insurance legislation. While it played well to the racist fringes and gave Wilson fifteen minutes of fame at tea party rallies, turns out Wilson lied.
As the hateful venom flooded the airwaves, and saturated America’s living rooms, the Bill O’Riellys, Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks demonized a doctor named George Tiller, referring to him as a "baby killer" until a lunatic named Scott Rhoeder walked into Dr. Tiller’s church and blew his brains out. The pro-life message was being delivered all right.
The election in Massachusetts of Republican Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s senate seat was heralded as the nail in the coffin of healthcare reform, and ended the Democrats’ filibuster proof supermajority in the senate. Petrified and defeatist Democrats lamented the loss of power they never bothered using anyway, and joined media pundits and Republicans in their own death march.
Yet a polarizing, divisive figure, whose very name and presence screams partisanship, soldiered on. The first woman Speaker of the House and arguably the most powerful woman in the world along with Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, revived the bill. President Obama finally rolled up his sleeves and realized that his attempts at bipartisanship were a hopeless pipe dream that would leave him and America with nothing.
A brave cadre of 59 000 nuns represented by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, who broke rank with the Church had stated: "We believe that genuine health care reform is a moral imperative; therefore we call for a health care policy that respects and protects human life and dignity and advances universal coverage."
The Pope was far too busy offering disillusioned Irish Catholics a belated, half-hearted apology for yet another sexual abuse scandal referring to their continued and deliberate practice of covering up and sheltering child rapists in the Church (rather than bring the irreparably tarnished and corrupt institution into disrepute), to stand up for the life affirming goal of universal health coverage.
Challenging Orly Taitz for the clown crown, the demented Representative Michele Bachmann turned classic symptoms of paranoid delusion and bipolar disorder into political strategy kooky enough for Glenn Beck to endorse, dethroning Ann Coulter, and turning her into an irrelevant, incoherent cross between Stephen Baldwin and Phyllis Schlafly.
A half-witted, half-term governor former governor from Alaska characterized the debate as between supporters of socialism and "those who love America." These are the same anti-socialists who have no qualms with the United States giving aid to Israel to support the egalitarian and socialist roots of Zionism by enticing Jews in the Diaspora to come to Israel through generous housing and other subsidies in addition to government-created jobs that both fund and perpetuate settlements.
Major compromises were made, and what ultimately passed on Sunday evening was a watered down version of health reform that did not include the robust public option that many Americans were seeking to encourage competition.
Despite abortion language that reiterated the existing Hyde Amendment that was inserted, ensuring that a woman’s right to a legal, constitutional abortion is never funded by the government, the issue still nearly managed to derail reform.
By the time the vote came over the weekend the Tea Party had turned sour, even uglier than the racist McCain Palin campaign rallies of 2008.
Revealing their true colors and true intentions, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver was spat on by a protestor, Rep. John Lewis was called a "nigger" and Rep. Barney Frank was called a "faggot" and "Homo Communist." That a group appropriating a sex act known to most gay men to define their movement and which sounds gayer than a Richard Simmons aerobics class would scream homophobic slurs is delicious irony – but irony is as elusive to Tea Party activists as coherence is.
No sooner had one of the biggest obstacles to passage of the bill, the congressman Bart Stupak, announced his support, he secured an assurance that President Obama would sign an executive order ensuring that no federal funding be spent on abortion, Republican attack dogs on the floor of the House of Representatives turned on him. A coward from Texas named Randy Neugebauer took a whole day to admit it was he who called Stupak a "baby killer" in a stunning lack of institutional decorum that echoed the rancor outside.
Just before the voting began, Rep. John Boehner, bristling with unbridled anger in a speech -- or rather a screech -- that turned his fake orange tan crimson then white, screamed "hell no you can’t" as Democrats could and did moments later.
And so, after an historic moment in the House occurred, healthcare reform became real. Far, far from perfect, and sorely lacking in many areas, but real. For the first time in a long time, CSPAN must have trumped ESPN.
When America woke up on Monday morning, the sky had not fallen. No one who had health insurance woke to find it gone, or their premiums raised.
The best post-mortem of how this was played by the Republicans was written by a Republican strategist David Frum underscoring how momentous the occasion was, warning Republicans that the chances of repealing the bill were all but impossible and that they best figure out a different strategy for November elections, in which a sweep was by no means inevitable, but rather unlikely.
Predictable blowhards from the angry right responded with the same political tone deafness they demonstrated throughout the process.
Rush Limbaugh, who vowed to leave the country if health insurance reform passed ranted incoherently, safely ensconced in his Vicodin-induced, white supremacist haze somewhere in Florida, with no immediate plans on his imminent departure.
Violating his First Amendment protections by inciting and espousing violence and harassment, hiding behind his microphone, he vented over the passage of what he previously termed health reform -- reparations. "We need to defeat these bastards," he frothed. "We need to wipe them out. We need to chase them out of town. Defeat the Democrats, every one of them that voted for this bill. They need to be exposed and hassled and chased from office."
Glenn Beck screamed, and cried and confused himself, asking "Are you an American or are you a mouse? Are you an American or a European?" Whether he was asking his listeners or himself wasn’t clear.
John McCain, the senile Senator from Arizona emphatically vowed that his party "will no longer work with the president." A real loss, mind you, given how much his party had worked with the President already. Sounding like an angry schoolgirl who just had her hair pulled, he told an Arizona radio station: "There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year." Seemingly having forgotten why he was elected and for whom he works, and wondering why an inexperienced hack swathed in Jack Abramoff’s money and who can’t tell the difference between a man and a horse, is set to oust him in a primary election.
Yet for all the rhetoric and all the anger, and exposure of the litany of corruption, lies and misinformation, defeated and deflated Republicans will no doubt continue to do everything in their power to put a genie back into a bottle, tossing about overused and tired claims of liberty thwarted and freedom denied.
Hypocrites will continue to use abortion to demonize the bill and the people who voted for it, while sentencing people to death, proposing bombing campaigns, selling weapons and advocating war, seeking to roll back the clock and repeal the legislation.
Media pundits who have proved wrong on every issue time and time again will weigh in with their Monday morning quarterbacking and unreliable predictions for November that mean as much as a McCain Palin bumper sticker.
But here are some facts that no amount of posturing can take away as this becomes the law of the land.
Six months after the President signs the legislation, the majority of plans will be prohibited from placing lifetime limits on medical coverage, and will not be able to cancel policies of those who fall ill. Children with pre-existing conditions will no longer be denied coverage. In 2014, no one with pre-existing conditions will be denied insurance, all lifetime and annual limits on coverage will be eliminated.
On Tuesday, March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the bill into law.
No matter how loudly the angry right stomps, screams, swears and complains, a holocaust perpetrated by greedy insurance company executives is coming to an end.
No matter how much the confused tea partiers cling to their Medicaid cards while decrying socialism and the "government takeover of healthcare," and no matter how many hateful epithets they hurl at blacks, gays, immigrants and anyone who isn’t part of their narrow, white field of vision, this murder spree is wrapping up.
A Harvard study conservatively estimated that somewhere in the region of 45 000 people die annually in the United States for no other reason than that they don’t have health insurance. Those numbers aren’t just statistics. That’s a child losing his dad because he didn’t get a check up and had an easily preventable heart attack. It’s a parent losing a child because they couldn’t afford to give her chemotherapy.
Treatments for high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol that can now prevent complications and lengthen the lives of someone’s mother or father will no longer be denied. How many hundreds of thousands of people or millions should die before we call this holocaust what it is?
When insurance companies use algorithms to identify who among those paying them obscene amounts of money to begin with is sick, so they can cancel their coverage when they need it the most, denying them life saving treatments and drugs, how is that different to placing a yellow star or pink triangle on their arm and leading them into a gas chamber?
Opponents of healthcare reform and those seeking to undermine the bill in a futile quest to get it repealed need to own the fresh blood they seem to want back on their hands. We were already killing grandma. The death panels were already rationing care, with names, like WellPoint and Aetna.
No matter how much they continue to shriek, posture, cheat, lie, and manipulate, America passed a bill that, for all its shortcomings, seeks to put an end to this insane, profit-driven insurance company killing rampage once and for all.
Not one Republican voted for it.
And they call themselves pro-life.