My daughter tells me I shouldn't use the word "stupid". But she is asleep now, and I don't care.
Who do I blame for all this? Naturally I blame the House Republicans and their insistence that Obamacare be repealed. I've admitted previously to not be a huge fan of Obama, but this time I'll close ranks and simply agree with the sentiment that in the past -- what, three years? -- every effort to defeat Obamacare by repeal, or litigation, or a change of government has failed.
There are times when great leaders fight to the last tooth and nail -- or at least promise to. Senator Ted Cruz invoked Churchill when he said that he would fight with every breath in his body to defeat the law, going so far as to say "As Churchill said, we will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the streets".
I would argue that Churchill is probably the greatest war time leader of any nation. He gave the actual "fight on the beaches" speech as Britain awaited invasion by a German military machine that had just broken the will of France -- an easy thing, you may say, but if you've never actually read about the Fall of France I would encourage you to do so. It is an epic tragedy and war had never been envisioned on such a scale before that time.
It was a bleak moment, but Churchill was basically asserting that he would fight to the last breath in his body. If Britain was taken he would even continue the war from the far flung reaches of the British Empire, and his wartime strategy shows his desire to anything, ANYTHING, to prick and scratch at the Germans, even if it be only with a pin.
I think it is clear that imminent invasion is rather different than the passage of a bill you don't particularly like. But I suppose there are those that feel that Obamacare does threaten the Liberty we enjoy and therefore threaten the very core of our national values and identity, and therefore must be fought to the last.
Still, I have to believe that sometimes great leaders have to recognize when they are defeated, when they have reached their limits, when they have exhausted all their viable options. The Republicans are there. If they were to accept the fact that our Democratic institutions did -- albeit narrowly -- spring forth Obamacare and they therefore must live with it, maybe work to make it better, then I would give them immense credit. It takes a great deal of character to accept defeat, sometimes perhaps more than it does to fight on to the last.
Getting back to Mr. Churchill, I wonder what he would have thought about all this? I'm no expert on Churchill, but if his first volume on the history of the second world war is any indication he was a man who had an English Public School morality, a sense of fairness and right and wrong bred on the rugby fields and polo grounds of his youth. He believed in the rule of law and international institutions. Indeed, when Hitler overstepped his bounds in the mid thirties by re-arming and later reoccupying the Rhineland, Churchill felt that a vigorous international response sanctioned by the League of Nations was called for.
Based on that admittedly slim argument, here is a man for whom the law was paramount -- provided the Germans weren't bombing the shit out of his country, in which case perhaps it wasn't. Still, if Churchill had been handed a political defeat such as the Republicans received with regards to Obamacare, I think he would respect the institutions of the law, accept his defeat with magnanimity, and seek to move on in the business of governing the nation as best he could.
Or maybe he wouldn't. The Winston Churchill I have my in head though, he certainly would have, even if he never really existed.
I wish our Congress would do the same.
Though I must say, it would be interesting to see Senator Ted Cruz and his band or renown fight Obamacare on the beaches. I imagine it might look something like this:
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