The Republicans' Modest Proposal

Sorry for my absence. I have been doing a spot of writing, and haven't dragged my attention towards matters political for a few weeks.

That was until this unseemly fracas about federal health coverage for children.

Is it just me, or is the Republican party laying an enormous elephant trap for itself? Or perhaps the Dems set it for them. I imagine Nancy Pelosi sitting in the bushes in a pith helmet. I thought the first rule of politics - of life, even - was to fawn and praise and suck up to children. Children are the future. It's not their fault their parents are feckless, and idle, and possibly drug users. Look at their big, imploring eyes!

Perhaps realising the difficult rhetorical circumstances they find themselves in, Republicans have started to push the notion that public healthcare is a gateway drug. Democrats hang about schools, offering a little sniff of free healthcare for kiddies, and before you know it the Marxists are in, and the whole economy will be monochrome and monolithic.

I don't really know the details of the economics of healthcare. I hear that the French and German systems are very good, and guarantee both a high quality of care and full coverage. I'm too lazy to get my head round it, though. I'm sure American healthcare, if you can afford it, is among the very best. But 45 million people without health insurance (and facing bankruptcy if something awful happens) must constitute a social crisis, even if you're a cold-blooded conservative. That's one-sixth of the population. It's not something you can just ignore, surely?

It is, according to the Republicans. If you are the kind of credulous slack-jawed type that believes their rhetoric, you wouldn't think there is a problem at all. And even if you did, you would be willing to sacrifice the health of millions for a principled objection to the use of government to solve social problems.

It all reminds me of the fall of the Conservative party in the mid-1990s, when they appeared so ludicrously backward, heartless and doctrinaire that the British regarded them with a mixture of amusement and pity. It's probably too much to hope the Republicans collapse likewise. But perhaps they will nominate Fred Thompson, and the party will become so illogical and bizarre that it will transgress some fundamental law of the universe and just quietly wink out.