THESIS: The health care reform legislation is bad, Tuesday was a referendum on it, and Democrats should drop it unless they're both suicidal and immoral
MODE OF ARGUMENT: Death by verbiage
STYLE OF ARGUMENT: Ornate
OPENING SALLY: Corrects the president's use of the word "precipice"
LENGTH: 743 words, counting opening quotes from the president and the Oxford English Dictionary
MODE OF ARGUMENT: Death by verbiage
STYLE OF ARGUMENT: Ornate
OPENING SALLY: Corrects the president's use of the word "precipice"
LENGTH: 743 words, counting opening quotes from the president and the Oxford English Dictionary
BIGGEST LOGICAL LEAP: Obama's decision to campaign in Massachusetts proved that he already knew his candidate had lost.
SILLIEST EXERCISE OF ERUDITION: "Democrats now cling grimly to Robert Frost's axiom that "the best way out is always through.'"
WHAT GEORGE WILL SEES: "national dismay about the incontinent government expansion, of which [the health care] legislation is symptomatic"
BILL CLINTON'S MISTAKE IN CHOOSING HEALTH CARE OVER WELFARE: Underestimating the "slight[ness]" of "public enthusiasm for the former"
OTHER VERBAL CAMEOS: "serial bribery," "joyless tawdry slog," "arrogance and malfeasance," "steppingstones of liberal excesses," the verbs "to trounce," "to presage," "to leaven," and the adjective "benighted"
BONUS: Will explains "the essence of contemporary liberalism"
THE LAST WORD--WORDS, RATHER:
BILL CLINTON'S MISTAKE IN CHOOSING HEALTH CARE OVER WELFARE: Underestimating the "slight[ness]" of "public enthusiasm for the former"
OTHER VERBAL CAMEOS: "serial bribery," "joyless tawdry slog," "arrogance and malfeasance," "steppingstones of liberal excesses," the verbs "to trounce," "to presage," "to leaven," and the adjective "benighted"
BONUS: Will explains "the essence of contemporary liberalism"
THE LAST WORD--WORDS, RATHER:
If the Democrats' congressional leaders are determined to continue their kamikaze flight to incineration, they will ignore Massachusetts's redundant evidence of public disgust. They will leaven their strategy of briberies with procedural cynicism -- delaying certification of Massachusetts's Senate choice, or misusing "reconciliation" to evade Senate rules, or forcing the House to swallow its last shred of pride in order to rush the Senate bill to the president's desk. Surely any such trickery would be one brick over a load for some hitherto servile members of the Democratic House and Senate caucuses, giving them an excuse to halt their party's Gadarene* rush toward the precipice.
*WIRE'S HELPFUL NOTE: Gadarene--as in the Biblical Gadarene swine who, possessed by demons, hurled themselves into the sea
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Heather Horn
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