Health Wars (9/25/09)

Oh, my stars and garters, if THIS spoonful of sugar doesn't make the BarryCare medicine go down, NOTHING will:

Senator John Ensign (R-NV) wanted to get an answer on the implications of the individual mandate in the ObamaCare bill floated by Max Baucus (D-MT) during the markup session. Ensign asked Thomas Barthold, chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, what would happen if a taxpayer refused to buy health insurance and then refused to pay the subsequent fine, which could run to $1900 for an individual. Barthold replied that one shouldn’t do the crime if one doesn’t want to do the time:

Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it “Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold.”

See the note for yourself here.

Well, yeah. Baucus's failure-to-buy-government-health-"insurance" fine is openly described as an "excise tax," and the Internal Revenue Police IS the enforcement agency, and if you don't pay your "taxes," eventually you DO go to the slammer.

What I wanna know is, what ever happened to the party of "choice"? Because we (and a lot of them) know what's GOING to happen to them next November.

Not that those Dems who realize what they've done to themselves will ever admit it publicly, you understand, no matter how mentally impaired they have to make themselves sound:

Blocking a public health insurance option is a relatively low priority for conservative Blue Dog Democrats, according to an ongoing survey of its members. The fading House opposition could clear the way for the public option to move through the chamber....

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was the catalyst for the Blue Dog self-reflection when she floated the idea that roughly twenty Blue Dogs could support a public option.

“There was some suggestion that there were twenty,” Herseth Sandlin said. “There clearly are not. From the numbers that I have seen, although not everyone has submitted the surveys, even if they had and they all said yes it wouldn’t be twenty. Right now it’s less than a dozen.”

Crazy Nancy was pulling the twenty figure straight out of her asshole. She knows it isn't twenty and her audience knew it isn't twenty, but she wanted to convince them it was twenty because otherwise the spin shield would pop like a soap bubble and she'd have to run up the white flag, and that is something she will never, EVER do.

That's why the Shrieker killed any chance of anything that could remotely be interpreted or otherwise taken to be a compromise yesterday. The bona fide legislative phase of the Health Wars is effectively over. We've now entered the political phase, in which the Donk Politburo will, as they're already doing, completely walk back to square one and obstinately ride their undiluted, public-option-led, original-recipe boondoggle straight into the ground on a kamikaze run to end all kamikaze runs, and then spend the 2010 midterm campaign bludgeoning the GOP as having "killed" "universal" healthcare "for the last time".

The Left knows that BarryCare is dead. But they will never accept that it died because the American people read the bill and rejected it. It HAS to be something else, someone else's fault. When it comes right down to where the cheese binds, Nancy Pelosi will commit political suicide (with a bunch of Blue Dog seats) before she will commit ideological suicide by admitting the she, Godbama, and her party were, and always have been, wrong. Like Sonny, that would deprive them of their very purpose.

And since they'll never accept REAL redemption, that would only leave....one option.