Best single sentence I think I’ve heard to describe the Left’s notion of ‘governance’…

“Just dump so much government-by-decree on taxpayers that digging out from under it is more work than living under it.”

Doesn’t that sum it all up so nicely? People like us just want to be left the hell alone, and these meddling scolds constantly insist on pushing their programs and their plans and their ’solutions’ down on us poor, uninformed fools. The problem is that people like us aren’t generally built for collective activism or large-scale battles to shape the form of federal governance, because people like us a) are put off by the notion of collective anything, and b) want ‘large-scale’ and ‘federal governance’ nowhere near each other in the same sentence. Thus the permanence of Leftist federal programs - we are so exhausted by the fight, a fight which we quite honestly have no time for (our attentions being otherwise occupied by the demands of everyday middle-class life, i.e. work and family), and are in effect so relieved to see the struggle end - even when it ends in victory for the progressives - that the fortitude required to battle for the removal of the offending program is nowhere to be found. See, for two stomach-churning examples, the ticking fiscal time-bombs of Social Security and Medicare. Fifty or so years and counting, but I’m sure we’ll get around to repealing them soon.

This whole Obamacare debate is so very disheartening. The progressives will win yet again, and this piece of dead-man-walking legislation will stagger onward like a horror-movie zombie for generations to come, the undead moans of the movie version for “Braaaaiiiins” replaced with the never-ending wail for “Taaaaaaaxes.” We know it will be a disaster for this country. Everybody does. Yet we can’t stop it. This is utter insanity, the definition of which, it’s been said, is performing the same action over and over again and expecting a different outcome. We have numerous examples of Obamacare-like systems throughout the world against which we can compare the future performance of such a system here in America, yet we need look no further than the state of Massachusetts to see this abomination in all its glorious failure. Costs are up, emergency room attendance is up, availability of doctors is down, three of the state’s four insurance providers are hemorrhaging money - in short, everything that this program was said to fix has gotten worse. The Progressive response? Adopt it on a national scale! ‘Baffling’ does the idiocy of this logic short shrift. And so we come to the ultimate question - how do you debate a crazy person? Or perhaps more accurately, how do you debate a crazy person who’s moved into your spare bedroom and simply will - not – leave - until you agree that the sky is falling? For most of us, the answer is simple - quietly admit that the sky is falling to get the nut the out the hell out of your house so can get on with your life. Just realize, the crazy bugger’ll be back the next week, and the next and the next until your house is a European-style welfare state with the kind of cradle-to-grave government paternalism that you don’t yet realize you’re so desperately craving.