Between Reid and reason there is a great gulf fixed

Between Sen. Harry Reid and the use of reason in politics, "there is a great gulf fixed." Monday he let rip at the GOP's tea-party faction (those are the ones with muscles and a backbone), calling them "extreme," "fanatics" and "anarchists" living in a "partisan bubble."

The occasion was a Senate debate on whether the bankrupt administration should continue to be funded till mid-December. The GOP has learned from Newt Gingrich's experience that if one wants to threaten spendthrift "Democrats" with defunding, one should ensure that the "Democrats" get the blame if and when the music stops and the payroll stops getting paid.

The Republicans in the Senate are maneuvering to put Reid in the hot seat, making sure that he will be forced to decide either to put up with the GOP's plan to defund Obamacare or to shut down the government as the funds to pay for it run dry.

Reid knows he is between a rock and a hard place. His outburst against the GOP was triggered by the ever-adroit Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, whose timely objection prevented him from abandoning a hearing to consider a House bill giving the administration the choice between funding itself and funding Obamacare – but not funding both.

Yes, Congress (after much unseemly pork-barreling by Mr. Obama and his minders) passed Obamacare four years ago. Yes, the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional. But no, the nation cannot possibly afford it. And no, the people do not want it, as just about every opinion poll shows.

Of the 228 Republicans in the House, 227 voted for the bill Harry Reid did not want the Senate to talk about.

Reid vowed that no defunding of Obamacare will ever happen while he is Senate majority leader and Mr. Obama is in the White House. He said: "The ransom demanded by Republicans is unworkable and unrealistic. President Obama has been clear, and I've been clear. Any bill that defunds [Obamacare] is dead on arrival in the Senate."

Brave words. But Reid went on to abandon all restraint, thrice describing tea-party senators as "anarchists."

Here's the thing, Harry, baby. The duty of the party elected to opposition is to oppose. And that – at last – is what the GOP are beginning to do. They are holding the administration to account, and not before time.

It is the job of any administration to administer the government and its finances.

That does not mean keeping the show on the road month to month with vast loans from one's brutal Communist pals in China at an undisclosed political price, together with a trillion a year of money-printing that ought to have been stopped before it started and is now to be continued because Obamadebt has skyrocketed.

The duty of an administration is to live within the nation's means. Obamacare – like it or not – is well beyond Uncle Sam's means. It is a pointless extravagance. It will not provide hospital care for anyone who cannot get it at the moment. Judging by the opinion polls, it has largely failed even in its primary purpose of buying votes.

The GOP will be right to repeal Obamacare lock, stock and barrel just as soon as it commands the White House and both Houses of Congress.

Mr. Reid's unreasoning hate-speech against Republicans is an indicator of the fundamental unreason of the "Democrats" in Washington and of the hard left in politics everywhere.

It is the petulant unreason of the spoiled child who wails for an ice-cream he cannot have. It is the profligate unreason of the wastrel who squanders his inheritance today without thought for tomorrow.

It is the flagrantly materialist, "I-Want-It-Now" unreason of the shopper whose credit cards are all maxed out.

It is the unreason bordering on insanity of the Enron executive who fiddles the books just one more time to try to conceal the intellectual as well as financial bankruptcy of an enterprise that was long doomed.

It is not at all grown-up.

The collapse of failed systems of government throughout history nearly always comes about not through any inescapable adversity in the national fortunes, nor through any shortage of natural resources, nor through any act of God, nor through any aggression from without, nor through any subversion from within, but through the sudden, monstrous failure of the prevailing faction among the governing class to think straight – or at all.

Worldwide, reason has left the left.

National debts everywhere rising beyond all hope of repayment because the welfare the left cherishes is unaffordable. Merely dubbing Obamacare "The Affordable Care Act" does not make it affordable.

Trillions thrown away everywhere on non-existent global warming because the totalitarian control the left cherishes cannot be obtained except by lying about our effect on the climate.

Children everywhere tortured and killed in their mother's womb because the family the left hates is still the unit of society.

So-called "gay" so-called "marriages" permitted everywhere because the Christian values the left hates still hold sway in the hearts of millions.

To get a glimpse of the hate-filled, nihilistic destructiveness of a political credo that has created nothing and bids fair to destroy everything, just listen to Harry Reid.