United States Senator Jim DeMint, (R-S.C.) on the Health Care bill yesterday:

“If we’re to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

Isn’t it lovely that the Republicans are so clearly focused on helping the American people?

While Obama is trying hard to fix what’s wrong with the country, the all the Republicans can think of is, how can we use this to help us win elections by destroying our political enemies? All they can do is live in the past–they think that this is 1993. They remember that when Bill Clinton tried to fix health care, they successfully used it to break his momentum. Screw the American people and their need for affordable health care, what self-respecting right-winger gives a crap about that? Economic stimulus? Fight it tooth and nail–Americans should be happy to suffer from economic depression if it means better polling for the GOP!

I noted the same thing back in March: right-wingers are naively fantasizing that everything is the same as it was 16 years ago, and all they have to do is run the same playbook and the voters will sweep them back into power. Be massively obstructionist, block everything, attack the president mercilessly, destroy his attempts at reform. What morons. This is, in all seriousness, their version of “Country First”–the distinction being that their version of “country” is “whatever is good for Republicans.”

If the economy fails to get better, then the one thing that can perhaps save Obama is the fact that the Republicans have been such asses that people will accept the idea that it was at least as much their fault as it was the president’s.

Republicans have made it clear: the well-being of the American people takes a back seat to GOP’s political fortunes.