Thermopylae for Health Care.
Quin Hillyer at The American Spectator has written a rousing rebuke to Republicans for not fighting hard enough to keep the monstrosity of Health Care from coming to fruition. He likens it to the 300 Spartans…we must fight. Republicans just do not fight hard enough. Hillyer has some brilliant suggestions for the Stupid Party:
Conservatives want Thermopylae. Congressional Republican leaders instead imitate the Confederate defense of Atlanta -- the one that led a local editor to write that General Joseph E. Johnston's reputation had "grown with every backward step."
Thermopylae, of course, was where the famed "300" Spartans (and about 1,200 others) fought off many tens of thousands of Persians for three full days, with their courageous sacrifice helping the Greeks eventually win the war. The defense of Northwest Georgia, on the other hand, showed that Johnston was adept at putting up a united front, seizing excellent defensive positions in well-drilled fashion -- and then retreating time after time in perfect order, saving his army for a "later" that never came while inflicting only glancing damage on his enemy as the Yankees gobbled up territory like a horde of Pac-Men… until Atlanta and eventually the whole of Georgia fell to the onslaught.
In the battle over health-care policy (and in most other big fights in recent years), Senate Republicans likewise have maintained unity, have arrayed themselves on favorable ground, have performed every technical maneuver with flawless precision -- and have yet to win a single major battle about which conservatives care deeply. Snip –
What infuriates conservatives is the attitudinal signals the Senate leadership sends. The health care bill is treated as just another piece of legislation -- certainly more important than most, as Atlanta was a more important city than most, but not ground to be defended by every available means, to the death, as if a civilization hangs in the balance the way Greek civilization was threatened by the Persians. Yet for millions upon many tens of millions of Americans, the health-care battle is indeed their generation's domestic version of the Greco-Persian War, and nothing less than a Thermopylae-like stand will be acceptable. These middle-Americans don't want amendments to the bills. They don't want to force bill supporters into tough votes that will be used against them in the 2010 fall campaigns. They don't care about positioning for future battles on other legislative subjects, and they don't give a flying expletive about maintaining the alleged dignity of the Senate.
What they want is to beat Obamacare: They want to ward off this abomination, this vicious assault on the Constitution and on the free market, this affront to individual liberty in a realm that is intensely and profoundly personal. They want to defeat it, trip it up, smother it, by any and all means within the law. They hate Obamacare. Snip –
Oh, sure, Sen. McConnell is a good man who has been working hard, very hard, to block Obamacare. But so too did Gen. Johnston work hard. So too do lots of losers work hard. But they don't work effectively. They don't use every means at their disposal. They don't crawl over broken glass to win. They don't say "Nuts" to Nazi surrender demands. They don't see Santa Anna and, like Jim Bowie, pull out an eponymous knife and fight to the death.
What many Republican senators still don't seem to understand is that the health-care fight isn't merely one fight in a larger war; it is the war. Lose it, and we can't reverse, not ever, the massive infringement on our liberties.
Here are just a few things Republicans can do right now to defeat this juggernaut.
… stopping this juggernaut shouldn't be as difficult as it has been made out to be. Politicians being politicians, there absolutely must be at least one Democratic senator, or three more House members, who care enough about their own political skin to buck their party leaders. No single major proposal in generations has generated such strong opposition. With more than 60 percent of the public against Obamacare -- and more opponents passionately against it than the combined total of all its proponents, mild or passionate alike -- it is inconceivable that Republicans can't talk a few Democrats into the more popular position.
Sen. McConnell could pledge to Nebraska's Democrat Ben Nelson, for instance, that if he joins a successful Republican filibuster then the National Republican Senatorial Committee would not raise even a single finger against him for re-election in 2012. The price would be worth it. But if Nelson still won't play, McConnell could come up with myriad ways to cut Nelson in half.
Indiana's Evan Bayh should be made to sweat, too. House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence, for instance, could take a risk his idol Jack Kemp never took, and announce before the Senate vote that he will give up his safe House seat to try to send Bayh bye.
You get the idea. There’s much, much more that Republicans can do here, but they either are too blinded by the process in D.C., don’t see the severity of the effect of this on the future of the country, or they don’t seem to really care and have given up because there is no point in fighting. Hold your ground, Republicans. Fight this to the death. Please, read all of Quin’s suggestions at the link. You can then read some of the best commenters on any site. Then, e-mail this article to your senators and representative. Read it all here: http://spectator.org/archives/2010/01/07/thermopylae-for-health-care
DeMint’s bold objection.
A little bit of a rebuttal to the previous column, Rick Scott at www.redstate.com has a little-known story about Sen. Jim DeMint’s effort to drag a cow on the tracks in front of the runaway train of health care reform.
Aside from a handful of mentions, not much has been made thus far of Republican Senator Jim DeMint’s courageous objection to the appointment of conferees on the health care bill.
Most people know that the House passed one version of a health care bill at 11 pm on a Saturday, while the Senate passed a very different version at 7am on Christmas Eve. Before any bill can go to the President for signature, those differences are normally resolved in what is known as a conference report, negotiated by representatives, called “conferees,” appointed by the House and the Senate.
But Senator DeMint led a behind-the-scenes effort by Senate Republicans to object to the appointment of conferees. The objection means the House will take up the Senate bill, and if any changes are made, the bill has to work its way back through the entire legislative process in the Senate again. And changing the bill means another tough vote for nervous House Democrats, and even more disconcerting for Senator Reid, the bill will have to go through the whole Senate procedure again, working to collect another 60 votes. Further, the process will potentially expose the bill to new amendments from those in Congress who saw the deal Senator Nelson negotiated in exchange for his support.
This is significant! Let’s not forget how expensive it was for Reid to get 60 votes the first time. Pelosi and Reid must now huddle behind closed doors, unofficially, and try to hammer out yet another secret bill that is capable of winning the votes of 60 Senators.
Uh-oh – State Department knew a lot about Christmas bomber.
Richard Grenell has a devastating post over at www.biggovernment.com. Hillary Clinton’s State Department is right in the middle of this near disaster. Now it seems she reigns over a department who got a 3 a.m. phone call and then basically went back to sleep. No wonder Obama isn’t firing anyone. Would he fire the wife of a former president? Hmmm? Should be interesting.
Not only did the State Department not comply with all the requirements Secretary Clinton had said, but the State Department also violated United Nations Security Council Resolution 1735 by not providing the new information they received on an al-Qaeda suspect to the UN. We know that State Department officials in Nigeria and Washington had the information because someone wrote a top secret cable dated November 20, 2009 explaining that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had ties to al-qaeda. This means that the State Department had 35 days to revoke Adbulmutallab’s visa and share the information with the UN – it failed to do either.
Had the State Department shared the cable with other U.S. agencies or given the information to the UN, as required under the Chapter 7 Resolution, all Nations would have been obligated to deny entry and freeze the assets of anyone officially on the UN’s Terrorist List.
The smoking gun is the November 20 State Department cable that wasn’t acted upon. No one shared it with the Embassy visa section, other U.S. agencies or the UN. How could a top secret cable be written but not acted upon by the same Embassy that wrote it? Questions remain as to who approved the cable, where was it sent and why wasn’t a visa revoked because of the cable?
U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria Robin Sanders and Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Johnnie Carson need to answer some questions about what they did with the November 20, 2009 top secret cable containing crucial national security information. Did they ignore the fact that their Embassy identified an al-qaeda operative? Did they not check to see if a visa was already granted to this al-qaeda operative? Who all approved the visa? Who read the cable? At the very minimum, Ambassador Robin Sanders needs to tell the American people why she didn’t revoke the visa of Abdulmutallab after her team originally approved it.
What we’ve learned since Janet Napolitano and Hillary Clinton thought everything went as bureaucratically expected on Christmas Day is that President Obama takes surf board accidents on his vacation very seriously but is willing to delegate the safety of the American public to subordinates.
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