Enough and more than enough

Stacy McCain brings news of the vile slander committed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse against Republicans (and, by extension, everyone who opposes the Senate’s power grab-masquerading-as-health-care-reform). Here’s a sample of Whitehouse’s inflammatory speech:

History cautions us of the excesses to which these malignant, vindictive passions can ultimately lead. Tumbrils have rolled through taunting crowds, broken glass has sparkled in darkened streets. Strange fruit has hung from Southern trees. Even this great institution of government that we share has cowered before a tail-gunner waving secret lists…

There can be no compromise, no negotiation, no comity, no assumption of good faith by Republicans in their future dealings with the Democratic Party’s left wing (and considering how the so-called blue dogs were bought off with lucre and sweetheart deals for their constituents, any contrast between the left wing of the party and its “center” represents a distinction without a difference).

Our strategy should be to unite behind candidates who pledge to repeal this monstrous legislation and to break the power of the federal octopus that is within reach of delivering us into the clutches of a socialist bureaucracy. This is not the America that the voters wanted, the foolhardy vote for Obama and Democratic “moderates” by many citizens notwithstanding. This is the America of hardline statists for whom any actual improvement in health care quality and coverage is a matter of indifference. The whole point of “health care reform” is about enlarging the power of the state at the expense of the freedom of the individual. It is Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi making decisions for us because they have decided that we cannot be trusted to make the “correct” decisions ourselves. And it will not stop with health care.

Who will be content to live in the dystopia created by these grave-diggers of liberty? Once the precedent has been established that the federal government has the right to do absolutely anything, whose property – and life, for that matter – is truly safe? We are currently involved in an ideological civil war – what Ed Driscoll and others have referred to as a “cold civil war” – and the sooner we admit it, the sooner we can dispense with the notion that what we are seeing is business as usual, and that we can blithely go about our lives ignoring the ramifications of the decisions being made in Washington by a combination of hard-core leftists acting in concert with centrist quislings.

The votes we cast in 2010 and 2012 are likely to be the most important we will cast in our lifetimes.