Summary: Here's some useful advice from an old country saying: Never try to teach table manners to a pig – it doesn't work, it'll wear you out, and it just annoys the pig. The same advice goes for anyone who thinks they can teach even a bit of common sense to the preening political ideologues who've taken over the Republican Party and the U.S. House of Representatives. As we've seen in their incessant, pigheaded attacks on the new health care bill, their minds are not merely fogged up with extremist anti-government theories, their heads are impervious to rational thought. They failed to defeat Obamacare in 2010, despite using the despicable (and false) scare tactic of telling people the law authorized "death panels" to euthanize "grandma." Now they're trying to repeal the law by getting people to swallow their hogwash that it contains "a massive tax hike on the middle class." Really? No. One, it's not massive; two, it's a payment for a direct benefit that people will receive, namely decent health care coverage; three, very few people will have to pay the so-called "tax" at all; and four, many people and small business will get tax credits and federal assistance to offset the cost of their payments. The greatest failure of these Repubs, however, is that they offer no alternative to Obamacare. During the debate on their latest attempt to repeal the law a Democratic lawmaker asked for a copy of the GOP's health care plan so he could read it aloud to other members. Silence in the chamber. They have no plan. The Republicans' political slogan has been to "repeal and replace" Obama's reform, but they've since dropped the replace part, saying they can't offer an alternative until they complete the repeal. No surprise – I doubt this bunch can walk and chew gun at the same time.
