Reductio ad absurdum

One of the most specious arguments I have heard about the new health care bill is that it is somehow invalid because it was passed without a single Republican vote. It is true it was not, but the President has had nary a Republican vote in the last six years, is he supposed to forego attempting to pass any legislation at all because we have not found a way to get along with each other?

The lack of any middle ground in today's political arena is one of the most disappointing and nauseating aspects of the current conundrum we find ourselves in. You have to wonder how the GOP would react if they were to suddenly find themselves in a majority position, something that is indeed possible considering the caprice that is politics, and Dems starting obstructing like this? But the good bet says that things aren't changing soon, not with the Hastert Rule and gerrymandering and fringe attacks penalizing moderates on either side of the equation.

I don't blame the President for the lack of bipartisanship, his ill tempered opponents have been trying to destroy him from day one. For a while he was under some illusion that he could reach out to them but he soon thankfully found himself punked and wised up.

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Thirty nine votes to kill Obamacare and now that it is up and running, the opponents shift to constant, carping and nitpicking. Hard to pull the wagon when certain passengers insist on dragging their feet.

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Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant -- society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it -- its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as protection against political despotism. 

John Stuart Mill - On Liberty 1859 

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Nice to see the large rally in Washington today protesting government surveillance, organized by Stop Watching Us. The march drew support from over 100 separate groups. People are going to rise up and say enough. In the words of Pete Townshend, We're not going to take it!