Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds
has another ridiculously boneheaded anti-Obamacare column in USA Today again, which reads in part:
If the program fails, it won't be because Republicans stopped it, despite all the House votes and defunding efforts. It will be because millions of Americans' passive resistance brought it to its knees.
Now, putting aside Reynolds inability to objectively analyze anything more complex than a paper bag, let's break down the core of this "reasoning" here. He's basically saying that in a representative democracy like the United States of America,
when your side loses a free and fair election, the answer is to break the system.
Indeed, at the top of his article, he does this:
In his excellent book, Two Cheers For Anarchism, Professor James Scott writes:
"One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called 'Irish Democracy,' the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs."
Now here's the funny part: Reynolds is basically advocating bringing down Obamacare through mass refusal, refusal to participate, refusal to work within the system to fix the problems, refusal to acknowledge that the program may be helping people (and refusal to do anything other than shrug and say "gotta break a few eggs" when it comes to folks like this) but most of all, refusal to legitimize the fact that all three branches of the federal government signed off on this.
The second half of Reynolds' column deals with Colorado's pot laws, something he considers again to be a de facto defeat of federal law. He then lays out this passive resistance as a way to destroy Obama (and get high.)
The irony about all this is that this really is an example of classic "Saul Alinsky playbook" tactics to destabilize a government, something the "intelligentsia" of the right have been accusing Barack Obama of doing pretty much all his adult life.
Just goes to show you that the louder the right is accusing the left of doing something, the more they themselves are the ones doing it. We've gotten to the point now where Instagoofball is confusing bureaucratic inertia with mass refusal, and imagining a massive silent condemnation of Obamacare, Obama, Democrats and liberalism some tens of millions strong.
Why, I bet he thinks since only 65 million people voted for Barack Obama in 2012, the other 250 million people or so in the United States are silently standing strong against him, too.
Meanwhile, somebody should tell Glenn here that
Republicans are running in 2014 on how great Obamacare is.
In an interview with National Journal last week, Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, expected to be effectively unopposed for the Republican nomination for the open U.S. Senate seat in West Virginia, had some of the kindest words yet for one of Obamacare's key provisions from a GOP candidate.
"Coverage is great and having more people covered is excellent," Capito said of the expansion. She included a number of caveats -- she's concerned about long-term costs -- but she simultaneously acknowledged that repealing Obamacare is likely an unachievable goal and that aiming to improve the health care reform law while keeping people insured is a preferable pursuit.
"Hopefully, when I get to the Senate and we begin to make changes in the Affordable Care Act, that we will be able to find a way through tax credits and subsidies to keep folks in that insured area," she said. "And then, as they move up and we grow the economy -- because of better policies we're putting forward -- once they move up they're able to move out of that category, maybe in a more gradual fashion than one day you're on, one day you're off."
Capito's borderline heresy likely has a very pragmatic source: Medicaid expansion is a pretty good deal for her state. With the federal government covering all of the expansion costs for the first three years and 90 percent thereafter, the Kaiser Family Foundation projects that 116,000 West Virginians would be covered by the expansion by 2022.
Yeah, people are going to line up around the corner to remain without health insurance. And this is West Virginia, arguably the most anti-Obama state in the nation.
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