Bill O'Reilly Argues With Tea Party Head Over Defunding Obamacare: 'Not Going To Happen'

by JASmius

The man from "The Factor" is right....



Patriot Action Network poobahress Darla Dawald sneers, "So I guess [O'Reilly] expects us all to roll over and play dead."  So, once again, I must reiterate: This dispute among alleged friends isn't over whether to defund ObamaCare; it's over recognition of the fact that it can't be done from only the House of Representatives.  As I pointed out yesterday, only a vanishingly small portion of OCare funding is discretionary, the remainder being mandated by law - it IS an entitlement program, after all - and thus the "Defund At All Costs" camp is ready to commit seppaku over a hangnail while the malignancy will continue spreading throughout the patient unimpeded.  Plainly and simply, this battle was lost last November.  Period.

Jim Geraghty makes the same appeal to reason in today's Morning Jolt:

Discussing this with Greg Corombus on the Three Martini Lunch podcast the other day, he asked me, because I'm a skeptic of the Cruz-Lee plan, how I'd recommend eliminating ObamaCare. I said that because the Senate was unlikely to pass a budget eliminating funding for implementation of Obamacare, and because Obama is extremely unlikely to sign that budget into law, and that it's similarly extremely unlikely an Obamacare-erasing budget could pass by veto-proof majorities, we're still where we were last year: We need a president committed to repeal and replace, a Senate majority committed to it, and a House majority committed to it. We've only got one-third of that right now.

There are a bunch of folks who believe that because Obamacare is unpopular - and indisputably, it is deeply unpopular -- that when push comes to shove, Americans will stand with the GOP against Obama in such significant numbers, that Obama will be forced to sign into law a budget that defunds and effectively destroys his signature domestic policy. (Some presidents get a federal building named after themselves; Obama gets the entire U.S. health care system renamed after him.) I'd love to see that happen. But we make a major mistake when we confuse what we want to see happen with what is likely to happen.  

Could it happen? Sure. It's just not likely. Maybe the odds are good enough to try it . . . but if it doesn't turn out the way folks on the Right hope, they need a Plan B.  

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI [and a Tea Partier, last I checked]):  

It should be repealed. Obamacare is one of the worst pieces of legislation ever passed in this nation, but as long as Democrats control Washington, they will never allow that to happen. 

Republicans should build on the support that House Democrats recently showed in calling for the delay of Obamacare. We should try to remove the most damaging parts and make sure that all Americans — including members of Congress and their staffs — are treated equally under the law. We should then make certain that Obamacare is the preeminent issue in the 2014 congressional elections.   

Just as important, those of us who oppose Obamacare must assertively acknowledge the very real problems facing our health care system and demonstrate to America that our proposed solutions are better and actually will work.

I'm sorry, folks.  I truly am.  This is a bitter, demoralizing reality, but it's one with which I made my peace during the seven-week post-election hiatus I took from Hard Starboard Radio.  It is the same reality with which the Tea Party is stubbornly refusing to come to grips now, and that obstreperousness is threatening to combust what remains of the cause that cannot see what its mission has truly become.

The First American Republic died last November.  Today it's like the body of a decapitated chicken: running and flopping around the barnyard until it falls over.  As Darth Vader told Luke Skywalker of his own impending demise, "Nothing can stop that now," certainly not a quixotic, doomed OCare "defunding" last stand.  And when it does, even worse times will come.  The one and only way out of the dark abyss of Winston Churchill's one-time depiction will be to lay the cultural foundation for a Constitutionalist rebirth, the rise of a Second American Republic from the ashes to which Barack Obama has reduced its predecessor.  THAT is the Tea Party's purpose, and that is why it needs to gather and attract all the allies it can for the insurgency to come, not alienate and drive them away in fits of puerile, "purity"-obsessed pique.

As Ben Franklin once said, "We must all hang together, or we will certainly all hang separately."  If the Tea Party cannot, then they will play their unwitting key role in America's Gotterdammerung, precisely as Barack Obama would have scripted it.


UPDATE: Here's Speaker George Pickett, er, John Boehner, raising his sabre before ordering the uphill charge.