Don’t lose sleep over the shutdown deal
Do not pass “Go.” Do not collect $200. Take your anger over the result of this shutdown directly to November, 2026, when we’re going to kick their asses and take back the House and Senate both.
Republicans, following the instructions of Donald Trump as they always do, allowed Democrats to make the fight over financing the government about one issue: Health care subsidies for Affordable Care Act. Trump thought, oh, they want to hold out for a big Obamacare giveaway? Let them. People hate Obamacare!
The people he knows, maybe, but not even all of them. Fifty fucking percent of Republicans favor extending the ACA health care subsidies, according to a KFF poll take during the middle of the shutdown. Democrats? 94 percent, natch. Do you think we might need some votes from independents to win next November? 76 percent of them want the ACA extensions.
With RFK Jr. defunding the CDC, cancelling vaccine research, and promoting cod liver oil to “cure” measles, we own the health care issue. Refusing to vote to reopen the government unless the ACA subsidies are extended is maybe the single most popular thing Democrats have done since…jeez, I don’t even know when. It was smart to begin with, it was smart yesterday, and thanks to blinkered Republican small-minded shitweasal idiocy, it will be popular when they vote against the subsidies in December, it will be popular at the time the same fight comes up in January when we go through this whole charade again, and it will be even more popular by next November after Trump has spent the better part of a year screeching that he wants to kill Obamacare altogether.
Senate Republicans will line up like penguins and vote down the subsidies in December, and the House won’t even bother to hold a vote. By that time millions will have received notices of what their new health insurance bills will be. They will be very, very unhappy consumers of what Republicans are selling to them.
Health care is the one issue that every American has a stake in. Well, not every American. Bezos and Zuckerberg and other trillionaires will have their “concierge” care on their private hospital floors and even on their yachts, so they don’t give a shit. But even ordinary run of the mill millionaires could have an entire lifetime’s worth of savings and current income wiped out if what Republicans want to do with health insurance comes to pass, and they know it.
It’s a fucking gift, is what this shutdown has been. We own the health insurance issue thanks to Barack Obama and every Democrat before him and after him, and you would think that Republicans would take a look at these polls and the way that health care is working for us, and they’d try to find a way in, but noooooo.
Trump isn’t going to leave anything for Republicans to run on by the middle of next year. Ending wars thousands of miles from home? Hell, he’s got a whole fleet off the coast of Venezuela, and he’s rocketing boats on the Atlantic and Pacific sides of South and Central America. He’s threatening Nigeria with “guns-a-blazing” over “our CHERISHED Christians,” such an off the wall crock of testostero-mania that even fundamentalist loons like Ted Cruz were shocked and alarmed.
Who knows what the White House will look like by election time next year? He’s torn down the East Wing. That’s not polling well for him at all among independents and even some Republicans. He’s slapping those gold-leafed whorehouse squiggles all over the back of the White House above every door and window. Just wait: He won’t be able to resist turning the front of the White House into a low-rent copy of one of his Atlantic City casinos. He’s demanding the new RFK stadium in Washington be named for him.
How long before he insists that the Washington Monument get some gold-leaf appliques and be renamed “Trump Monument?”
He’s losing it, folks. I saw my sister Susan over the weekend. She’s been a senior nurse for more than 30 years, and she told me his whole nodding-off during meetings and press conferences is a classic symptom of a man with severe sleep apnea who refuses to wear the nighttime mask in order to get decent sleep. The body makes up for sleep lost at night with sleep during the day. When he can’t afford to nod off, like the speech to the generals in Quantico and his recent traipse through Asia, they’re shooting him up with B-12 and amphetamines to keep him vertical.
It can’t go on like that. He’s going to fall down, like the billionaire pharma guy did in the Oval Office, and that’s going to crack The Great Gold Façade. He’ll look weak. For Donald Trump, appearing weak isn’t just dangerous to his image as Ruler of the World. It’s deadly.
None of this is to say we haven’t got a fight on our hands. We do. We didn’t need more than 40 days to show how much we mean it when we say we’re for making health care affordable. They were even stupid enough to give us the issue of feeding hungry children by attempting to shut down SNAP and school lunches.
We’ve got issues coming out of the proverbial bugunda. Grocery prices, anybody?
Electric bills? Rents? Tried to find a house to buy lately? Paying for college loans?
Trump and the Republicans are turning citizenship into indentured servitude. That is what the “affordability” issue is really about. People are tired of paying everything they’ve got to The Man and watching him get on his Gulfstream and fly off to the Bahamas to count his Ponzi-gotten crypto while he pays a tax rate lower than a substitute teacher.
The Republican Party is way ahead of the intergalactic dreams of Elon Musk. They already live on a different planet from us.
We’ve got solid issues to run on. We’ve got energy. Democrats don’t phone it in.
There’s a slogan for you.
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