Dakota Beacon

Imagine Karl Rove or Krauthammer or Huckabee being on hand to advise FDR against pushing any plan for Lend-Lease aid on the grounds that any proposal to send guns and planes to England might distract the public just at a time when it looked as though there could be a groundswell of anger and indignation at the Luftwaffe's bombing raids.

It would be nice to think that had that happened, someone might have been around to point out that there would have been no point to the public getting fed up with the NAZIs if Roosevelt was using his fireside chats to tell us nothing could be done.

It's when nothing can be done, when we resign ourselves to the fact that there isn't anything that we can do about some intolerable situation -- that's when we wander off in search of distractions.

Now -- one can't be too careful with these World War II analogies. I'm not suggesting anyone wouldn't have been in favor of sending supplies to the foreign armies on whose side we'd soon be on. I would think the ObamaCare debate is, however, at least if not more consequential. We would have won the Second World War no matter what had happened to Lend-Lease -- we'd build the monument to the victory the master race that runs the park service may one day allow us to go back and visit.

But back to the here and now : Krauthammer and company appear to hold the view that if we're at a crossroads, ObamaCare is merely the equivalent of the road we shouldn't take -- a road Krauthammer is wise enough to realize will soon get very bumpy, and when that happens he apparently imagines it will somehow be possible to turn around.

Here's a thought : Maybe all the Republicans in Washington who've been leaking their disparaging views on Cruz and Lee can get together in a room and work out a plan to mend it not end it. Here's another thought : Convene a meeting of the leaders of all the groups who've been hoping to wrangle an exemption from ObamaCare and let them each draw to see who gets the “get out of ObamaCare free” card!

If that sounds a bit far fetched, try to imagine some other way whereby the unions might be induced to support an exemption for some other group that leaves them out. As for the rest of us, why should we support a waver for the AFL-CIO? Let them escape the dungeon they've helped trap the lot of us in and they'll be back to help the guys with the hot pokers get a pay raise.

The RINOs seem convinced some other issue will come along and nothing that's happening now will matter, but it may well be that little that happens after this will matter. With ObamaCare we may have gone from being a nation in decline to being a nation in an accelerated decline.

I can imagine someone out there with start-up capital and an idea for a business -- maybe it wouldn't be a business you'd want a part of -- only this guy might know just who he'd hire, just who he'd put in charge of sales and so forth. Twenty years ago a guy like that might have been someone you'd want to watch . Now he's the guy you can probably watch board a plane and fly away to start that business somewhere else.

Tim Lund is a writer, artist and political cartoonist.