I was unable to watch any of the Sebelius grilling. The Twitter consensus seems to be that she did poorly. However, Rush Limbaugh is despairing, apparently because he lives in a bad drug fantasy in which Republican attacks are harmless and liberalism is a slow but relentless juggernaut:
RUSH: Okay, so let me ask you a quick question. Have you been watching the Sebelius hearings today? Good. Tell me what you think.... I'm getting e-mails, "Boy, this Sebelius, oh, is she looking bad. Oh, my God, it's embarrassing. Oh, jeez, how stupid."So I guess Obamacare was deliberately built to fail because, as everyone knows, if it fails we're just instantly going to throw all the huge private insurers and all their expensive lobbyists under the bus and go socialist, because liberals rule, and we're Alinskying this just the same way we Alinskied our way to the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall and the restoration of Eisenhower-era 90+ percent top marginal tax rates, when we weren't getting all those Wall Street bankers arrested and getting Gitmo closed and stopping the drones and legalizing gay marriage all the way from Montana to Mississippi. Remember how we pulled all that off? Good times.
And my friends, I'm sorry, but I have a different take. I mean, she does look all that, but are there any Republicans there? There are? Really? I haven't seen any evidence of it.... Everybody's now caught up in whether Obama knows the details of this or not, and I'm just gonna tell you, he doesn't care. He doesn't care. Mao Tse-tung didn't know the details, all of them. Neither did Fidel.
I'm just saying these guys have a different agenda. The details don't matter. The chaos is what's crucial here, and with every new day of chaos, they're closer to what they really want, which is single payer....
They're constantly, always moving their agenda forward. They're always moving their ideology forward. They always have a plan; they're always on the attack.
... Republicans had a chance here to try to convince people, "We don't want this. We have to find a way to get rid of it. It's hurting too many people," whatever -- and if the people watching do not have as a take-away that we want to get rid of this, then no damage done, right? That's my take on it....
Knowing how to win is a really key thing, and the Democrats don't have any problems like that. They don't care. They'll lie. They're Alinskyites. They will lie, they'll make things up, they'll even hurt their own people in the process, as long as they win what they want....
Individuals told their stories of how they lost their insurance. Some of these of people are Democrats. A lot of them are. A lot of them voted for Obama, and a lot of them have said they wouldn't do it again. Democrats don't care about their own people being hurt here because their objective is to get single payer.
That's all they care about. That's their objective. They can see it in front of 'em, and every day that there is new chaos, then they're that much closer to it. See, I think this ought to be like shooting ducks at a carnival, this hearing. When this day of hearings is over, the American people ought to be rising up demanding this thing be scrubbed. That's the opportunity we had here, and apparently Republicans don't look at it that way.
The flip side of this -- Limbaugh's assertion that if Republicans had done their job properly at the hearings, the public would be rising up already, pitchforks in hand, demanding Obamacare's immediate repeal -- just seems like delusional Cruzism. The public is on our side! We just have to unleash their innate wingnuttiness with the mighty force of our passion for freedom! If the public doesn't rise up en masse and demand what we want, it's not because the public doesn't agree with us -- it's because we didn't make our case relentlessly enough!
That's what the Cruzians said about the shutdown -- that's what they still say about the shutdown. Do they really believe it? Does Limbaugh believe it? Does he believe what he's saying here about the public being one properly conducted congressional hearing away from taking to the streets and demanding Obamacare's repeal? If so, Limbaugh's really drinking his own Kool-Aid. He's really got himself convinced that America naturally shares his politics, and the only thing preventing a triumph of those politics is the fact that we liberals have sinister superpowers.
