Dear, sweet Democrats. When will you ever learn?
The conventional wisdom over the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, which SCOTUS ruled could not be compulsory, was always: no worries! Look how generous the Feds are being with the states! No state, even the reddest of the red states, would turn this deal down! Or, as Matthew Yglesias put it,
[..] Congress’ approach was essentially to make Red America an offer it couldn’t refuse—expansion could be done on very generous terms with the federal government picking up over 90 percent of the tab, but failure to expand would come with a hefty financial penalty in terms of lost matching Medicaid grants.
We heard this tripe repeated by all of the wise ones in our media, and even I knew it was bullshit. Sure enough, Red America is saying no. Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, Wisconsin — and who wants to bet that wingnutty governors in Oklahoma, Michigan and other places won’t also follow suit?
Who is shocked at this development? Anyone? Bueller? Please. I could have told you this would happen.
Democrats, listen to me when I tell you: crazy people cannot be bought. Were you not paying attention during the Republican debates when the crowd yelled “let him die!” at Wolf Blitzer’s hypothetical uninsured young person who suddenly needs care? When Blitzer asked who should pay, did you not hear Ron Paul reply “the churches,” to the cheers and hollers of the crowd? These are not people who think caring for the poor is their responsibility. Let someone else deal with it! Churches or … hey, just maybe they’ll die and then we won’t have to worry about it anymore. Freedom!
Democrats, listen to me when I tell you: the Republican Party is rife with assholes, sadists and masochists. It’s true! Have you not seen fleets of Hummers traveling the interstates of Red America, despite $3-plus gas prices? Why do they do this? Because sending a “fuck you” to Al Gore and the rest of the effete liberal tree huggers is more important than the $100 it costs to make it to Walmart. That’s money well spent to this crowd.
Democrats: these are people who have been voting against their own economic interests since forever. You thought you could bribe these people with generous federal money? Chumps. They don’t care about money and they sure as hell don’t care about the poor. They call them mooches and leeches, and blithely tell the unemployed to just “get a job” during the Second Great Depression, as if jobs grow on trees. This crop of Republican governors would set fire to a homeless person on national television if they thought they could score a political point and take that uppity Obama down a peg.
Democrats, listen to me when I tell you: you are not dealing with rational people. Please stop acting as if you are. We need you to show up and get on message here. Dangling little bipartisan baubles is not working.