What If Doll-Eyed Dolt Paul Ryan Is the Last One in the Anti-Medicare Pool, Not the First?

via PoliticalWire:

"I said it many times. This is like skinny dipping. Somebody has to be the first one in the pool and it's real lonely when you're the only one in the pool. Paul Ryan is in the pool. We want the rest of the town to come along."-- Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA)… on the House Republican Medicare proposal.

Of course, Paul Ryan is not the first Republican in the Anti-Medicare pool by any stretch of the imagination. Extreme right-wing Republicans always hated Medicare. Plenty of Republicans sought to keep Medicare from being implemented from the first. Plenty of Republicans have dreamed of dismantling Medicare throughout the life of the program.

What is being exposed (apart, apparently, from his fanatically-P90X-toned skinny-dipping body, if you'll forgive the unfortunate associations of this extended analogy) by the devastating push-back against Republicans who have sought to end Medicare through their endorsement of Randroid Ryan's ridiculous budget is that just as Social Security is the "third rail" of American politics, Medicare is a "fourth rail."

If this is as true as I think it is, it demonstrates that the anti-governmental logic driving a generation of Movement Republicanism is running against some hard limits that demand a radical change of course if the GOP is to be a viable national party rather than a self-marginalizing neo-Confederate regional rump party, and hence that Paul Ryan may find himself soon enough the last one skinny-dipping in a dark clammy pool.

(By the way, if Medicare is indeed the "fourth rail" of American politics, the best route to single payer -- congratulations Vermont! we Californians are ready, willing, able, and eager to join you next up -- does indeed look like "Medicare Buy In" and/or "Medicare for All" in the years to come.)