Waterloo

I recently posted about William Kristols 1993 Strategy Memorandum regarding the Clinton Administrations attempts to reform health care in America.

In the memorandum, Kristol stressed repeatedly the importance of defeating the attempts completely as being vital to the fuuture of the Republican Party. He said that any compromise would be defeat. The Republicans and the Health Care Industry pulled out all the stops at that time to defeat the reform. The methods used then were pretty tame by todays anything goes, media assault we are witnessing. Fear was used in 1993 to turn an initially 72% pro reform public against it.

Yesterday, in Washington, we saw the ideas of Kristol come full circle in the 9/12  March. Jim DeMint, the Republican South Carolina Senator stated the same thing in his remarks in the last few days, calling the event, Waterloo. In fact he stated, yesterday on Glenn Becks show:

DEMINT: We’re just, we’re coming down to a matter of days. If we lose the health care battle, I think we’ve lost it all. [...]
And that’s why I’ve said strong things like Waterloo and other things. This is, the nation has to focus on this because the czars and other things are secondary in a way if we lose health care, the president’s going to be so emboldened, we’re going to see so much more of the growth at the executive branch level that, I don’t think we’ll be able to stop it. But if we stop him on health care then I think we have the opportunity to maybe realign the whole political system in our country.

 Perhaps DeMint is absolutely right. The majority of Americans still want Health Care Reform and after the speech by Barack Obama this week, the support jumped dramatically. This spectacle in Washington, provided by FOX NEWS and their need to generate sensationalism by mobilizing the most extreme elements of the Conservatives and letting them parade their lunatic racist hate live on national television appears to be a very fitting self inflicted fatal blow. The pathetic image of these aging lunatics iis a very potent anti-republican message. If I had set up a stand selling White sheets and hoods, I couldhave made a small fortune.

Today, the real numbers are coming out and FOX's hyped reporting is being debunked,.
They had their nasty little parade, the world saw it and we disgusted.

They have lost control of the message and the lunatics are running the show. In their toxic bubble of desparate hatred, they have failed to realize that this is a very small and ugly portion of America. What worked to stifle opinion and discourse in the confines of a Town Meeting is very different when it is expanded to a nasty hate filled mob.

I'm watching this from Europe and all of the networks are beaming the images of the racist hateful signs that the demonstrators seem to think the world wants to see.
This is our acid reflux moment, to put it bluntly, in language most American can understand.

DeMint is right. This is Waterloo.