Toles Nails It, The Post Eddy Board Fumbles

Toles just nailed it. Meanwhile, the Post editorial board kind of stumbles, though I think they accidentally said something correct:

But we also believe that neither party has a monopoly on good ideas. When it came to health care, the Democrats were right to emphasize the morality and efficiency of universal coverage. But the bill could have been improved with the inclusion of more Republican ideas—by giving consumers more "skin in the game," for example, to promote cost control, or by reforming the nation's crapshoot of a malpractice system.

Actually, the Republigoat Party has proven itself in the past decade or three to be fairly bereft of good ideas. Tweety Matthews is quite fond of asking Republigoats point blank, what has your party done for America, and the Republigoats can hardly ever answer the question. Republigoat ideas center on revering the corporate state above and at the expense of all else, and this idea has proven to be downright destructive. As for HCR, the fact is that the bill is ass-full of Republigoat ideas. The very idea of the individual mandate—an idea President Obama campaigned against but came to champion—came from the annals of the Heritage Foundation. The "conservative's" chronic complaint that the main problem is somehow that we don't allow these assholes to conduct business across state lines is answered definitively with the Exchange. This bill is an incredibly restrained effort at reform. It is a conservative bill. It is the very stab at reform the Republigoats wanted to make back when the Clintons were trying to accomplish this in the '90s. The Post editorial board did say something correct, though I think they did it by accident: The law that stands won't do enough to control costs. Two or three essential clauses are missing; there is not attempt toward antitrust reform, there is no public option, and there is no provision to allow Medicare to negotiate prices on pharmaceuticals. The hope is that we can someday revisit and tweak. Perhaps. But that sort of thing can only happen when the pee-stream media takes off the goggles that makes it think that the Republigoats are of any value to this country whatsoever.