Via Belirico: The GOP's "Do Nothing" Plan for Health Care

During the presidential campaign, Republicans enjoyed poking fun at Obama's "Yes, We Can," campaign slogan. Most often they simply restated it as "No, You Can't." However, the GOP majority in the House is setting out to exemplify its own slogan: "No, We Can't."
The "We" in this case is the same "We" Obama spoke of with his slogan -- the collective "We," encompassing all Americans. "No, We Can't," however reflects the GOP's emphatic belief that when it comes to the challenges we face -- from health care to climate change and then some -- there's just nothing we can, or should, do.
Again, I mean the collective "we" that Thomas Friedman spoke of when he wrote that there's no "we" in American politics.

Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word "we" with a straight face. There is no more "we" in American politics at a time when "we" have these huge problems -- the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- that "we" can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective "we" at work.

It's the "we" that Martin Luther King Jr. referenced in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, when he wrote: "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

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