For the first time since Ronald Reagan left office, congressional Republicans are holding an unbeatable hand. They are in the position of the poker player who is dealt a royal flush in spades. In both cases, the only winning move is to “Do Nothing.”
In poker, it’s called “standing pat.” You don’t take another card and you certainly don’t fold. That’s because you know at the outset that if you play out your hand, you will most certainly win.
Well the GOP has been dealt a winning hand, where the Obama/Reid shutdown is concerned. If they simply stand pat and play out their existing hand, they and the nation at large, wins. Negotiating in this case is like drawing a card, when you are holding that royal flush. It’s the worst thing you can do.
Let’s look at the facts (and to be more than fair, we’ve used left leaning sources whenever possible). This is the GOP’s Royal Flush.
- A-Spades: Recent polls (CNN, CBS, AP) show that well over half of Americans now oppose Obamacare.
- K-Spades: AP now places Obama’s favorable numbers at a mere 37% and dropping. That’s not a whole lot better than Richard Nixon’s favorables, on the day he resigned from office. Sure, that same poll shows that the approval rating for all of Congress (Republican and Democrat) is only 5%. But when you look at individual ratings, you find that those like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul and a few others at the head of the defund or delay movement buck this trend and actually have remarkably high favorability numbers. It’s only Democrats and those Republicans who don’t keep their campaign promises, whose numbers are scraping bottom… people like Boehner, McConnell, Ryan, and McCain, to name just a few.
- Q-Spades: It has just been revealed that the government spent $634 million to design the Obamacare website and it doesn’t work. Much larger sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have been built for much less and they worked from day one. As one technology reviewer put it, “If that much money were spent for a website in the private sector, you would expect it to read your bloody mind.” But this one doesn’t work at all. Even CNN is reporting it. In fact, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer advised that Obama should take the advise of many Republicans and delay implementation of Obamacare for a year, to get the bugs out of the system. That’s from CNN!
- J-Spades: Huge numbers of working Americans are seeing their insurance costs skyrocket under Obamacare at the same time that many small businesses across the USA are cutting their full time employees back to 36-hour part-time employees, to avoid Obamacare penalties. So as a direct result of Obamacare, millions of mostly low or middle wage workers will be earning 10% less income per week. This group tends to be young, hourly workers, whose current insurance costs have been nominal, since they as a group, tend to be healthy. But it’s precisely this group of people who are seeing their insurance costs skyrocket, under Obamacare. One waitress reported that her Obamacare premium would leave her a choice of putting a roof over her head, eating or paying the much higher Obamacare premium. Contract (1099) workers, who provide their own insurance, are now seeing their insurance companies dropping them and offering them “Obamacare-qualified” policies at more than three times their current rates, with the same deductible they have today. It’s clear that Obamacare is seriously hurting working Americans.
- 10-Spades: As the Obama/Reid shutdown drags on and people aren’t feeling any pain, more and more of them are beginning to realize that we don’t need that much from government, after all. But since most Republicans already realize that fact, this realization hits Democrats hardest. After all, you do know what they call a Democrat who realizes that we can get along better with a smaller government, don’t you?… A “Republican.” The longer the shutdown drags on, the more Democrats will reach this conclusion and Obama and the Democrat Party can’t afford for that to happen. In fact, this is precisely why Obama is so desperately trying to make the shutdown hurt, by spending more to close open air monuments, the ocean and other such nonsense, than it would cost to just leave them alone. He is frantically trying to keep liberals from realizing that they can get along quite well without much of what government does.
That’s the GOP’s royal flush.
But it doesn’t end there. As if to raise the ante, jokes about Obama and Obamacare have become a staple for Jay Leno and other talk show hosts, even on typically left leaning networks. It seems that you can’t turn on any talk show without hearing some joke about Obama or Obamacare. But these jokes are much more biting than those about Clinton, Bush or even Nixon.
Folks, this shutdown battle is a lock for the GOP… that is, as long as Boehner, McConnell, and the GOP leadership don’t draw to their already pat hand. All they have to do is “Nothing” and the Democrats will have to come to them. Obamacare is already collapsing on its own. Though the Democrats claim otherwise, they can’t afford to let this draw out for very long, since some Democrat voters are already beginning to wonder just what it is that they are supposed to be missing in this shutdown. The longer Obama and Reid keep the government shutdown, the worse it becomes for the Democrats and the better it becomes for Republicans.
If Boehner, McConnell and the GOP leadership bargains away this decisive win, it won’t be because they were doing what they thought best for the nation. It will then be clear that those RINOs want Obamacare as much as do the Democrats, but they just don’t want to be seen as supporting it. It’s the GOP’s battle to lose.
The only winning move for Republicans in the Obama/Reid shutdown battle, is to do “NOTHING” and the GOP leadership knows it.
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