In poker, when you decide you're going to bluff on your crap hand, you have to ask yourself your level of commitment to the bluff. You have to ask how far you are willing to go with your bets. Because no matter how good you are at bluffing, someday, someone will call you on it, see you, and raise you. And when that happens, you have a choice: you can fold and walk away, or you can raise them and try to bully your way into winning the hand, hoping to scare them off without needing to show your cards. Simply put, you've gotta know when your hand is played out.
The Republicans have been playing a bluff game throughout the entire health care debate. On every substantive issue, they have deliberately lied about the facts behind their opposition to health care reform, through death panels, through overstating the cost, through uninformed opposition (who, when informed, inevitably support the pieces of the President's plan). And, as they won hand after hand, it looked as if they were gonna win the entire game. But then something strange happened when Barack Obama decided, after Republicans thought they had achieved Scott Brownitopia, decided to call the bluff. The cocky confidence of the lies began to disappear, and Republicans realized they had dug themselves into a fight that they could very well lose. Now, Republicans are recklessly spouting every possible argument against health care reform (even that it's "
demonic"), as well as condemning the very rules by which the Congress operates, rules the Republicans know very well are legit.
Really, what we're seeing is the GOP behaving like children trying to avoid getting their asses spanked. Their arguments, on a basic rhetorical level, are rank with the shit smell of desperate and deliberate stupidity. One of their arguments against reconciliation in the Senate? That it's never been
used on anything this big and expensive before. The actual rule doesn't specify how much a bill can cost. Do Republicans get to decide on what's the upper limit on the price of something passed under reconciliation? Hey, you know how you get to make that decision? By being in the majority. The same thing is going on now with the whole
absurd battle over the "deem and pass"
rule in the House. Republicans want to discredit everything in their rape-and-pillage march to stop the bill. Delegitimize it and burn it and let the teabaggers suck on the bones.
They are fucking
scared to death right now. Mitch McConnell's tiny balls recede into his torso and John Boehner turns from pumpkin color to peach out of fear because, if health care reform passes, they know that most people will just move on to the next battle and leave this one behind. Despite their threats, there is no campaign to be had on repealing it.
Finally, as Dennis Kucinich has now come
around to being able to vote for the Senate bill (and you can bet there's gonna be a convulsion in Left Blogsylvania about his flip-flop), it needs to be repeated: this is not a good bill. This is a huge payday to the very corporations who should be dissolved and whose CEOs should be ass-fucked by angry baboons with jungle crabs and then forced to bleed and itch without access to even a first aid kit.
But beyond the notions that, yes, eventually, and not fast enough, tens of millions of people will have insurance that they didn't before, and, yes, eventually, and not fast enough, the rules of business for health insurance companies will change for the better, there's this: Democrats are voting to demonstrate that the very concept of health care reform can be voted on. Let it go this time, and you're saying that it's radioactive. No one will touch it.
See, once you show that it's okay to do something like this, you can do it again, not only with health care, but with jobs and the environment and immigration and more. There is a chance that this is the beginning of some momentum, not the end, like that moment when you've been fucking all night and you think you're too tired to get to orgasm and then that second wind hits you and you just want it, you want to feel pulsation and rush and you're not gonna stop until it happens.
To go back to the poker game, at some point in the betting, a player's gonna call on the bluffer. And the bluffer's gonna have to show that his cards are shit, that he was lying, that he had nothing. And then the pot goes to the person who had the better hand all along.
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