Gratitude Monday: SAD!

We in the US had a bit of a NutriNinja® time of it last week. But it was the Repugnants in the House of Representatives, and the Kleptocrat, who were whirling around with the frozen bananas and kale.

And they were shocked, utterly shocked, to discover that their intent—expressed for the last seven years—to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something that came as close to no coverage as dammit—was not looked upon with favor by their constituents. Not even by those who ticked the boxes on the ballots that got them elected.

And, in fact, the Repugs up to and including the inhabitant of 1600 looked pretty much like The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, emphasis on gang, because all the flapping by Paul Ryan (R-19^th Century), and all the bullying that the Kleptocrat did—none of that could get enough Representatives of their own party to agree to vote on it to even bring it to a vote on the House floor.

Following the bigly failure, Kleptocrat started spinning on Friday afternoon—calling a reporter for The Washington Post, and then one for the New York Times (two publications he has characterized as “failing” and purveyors of “fake news”, SAD!), to explain that they were close, very close (they were 30 votes short on the Repug side), but no Democrat (“zero!”) would vote for it, so “they own this.”

(How the reporters managed not to bust out laughing at this, I do not know, because the Democrats never got a chance to vote at all, as the bill never made it to the full House.)

And the thing that accomplished this miracle was the unrelenting barrage of phone calls, faxes, letters, emails and visits to Congressmorons from voting constituents who expressed their outrage (in words of one syllable, and possibly with visual aids) at what they were proposing for a replacement for ACA. (And there were also members of the so-called Freedom Caucus who didn’t think this vicious and cruel proposal went far enough by way of cutting off Americans from healthcare or cutting taxes for the wealthy.) They also discovered that making jokes about how old white men don’t need mammograms so they shouldn’t have to pay for plans that cover them did not go down well, and they were unaccountably quiet when people countered their removal of women’s reproductive care as an essential health benefit with questions about how coverage for erectile dysfunction treatment should likewise be eliminated.

Well, we should be in for a world-class episode of finger pointing shortly, and we still have to find a way to get to the bottom of the matryoshka-levels of Russia-45 administration relationships, both to the Kleptocrat directly, and through his family and Gauleiters. Which means we have to find a way to get that cretin Devin Nunes off the House Intelligence Committee. And that’s going to be a lot of work.

However—we have shown that it is possible to hobble these monsters, to stop them in their tracks and to make them rethink how they go about trying to return us all to the Nineteenth Century. They are beginning to understand that they can run, but not far enough.

And I am grateful for that.