Kill that sucker dead

U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, typifies what's wrong with the Republican Party these days as it struggles with being the minority party:

DeMint, speaking on ABC's “This Week,” said Congress and the White House need to “slow down and get this right.”

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chairman of the budget committee, agreed with the need to get it right, but not if slowing down is just a strategy to kill health-care reform efforts Democrats are hammering out in Congress.

“Jim, I think, has been very clear. He wants to kill it,” Conrad said as the two senators debated the issue.

DeMint countered that he has a better plan than the ones Democrats are putting together in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Republicans have become so defensive about being called the "party of no" they've forgotten that the best answer to bad policies is usually no. And if the proposal is to jump off a cliff, the only answer is, "Hell, no!" If Republicans want to get back into the debate, they need to stop trying so hard to come up with slightly less deranged ideas as alternatives to Democrats' really deragned ideas.

I'm waiting for the senator or representative willing to say, "Do I want to kill the health-care reform effort? Well, I want to shoot it with a silver bullet and drive a stake through its heart, then cut it into tiny pieces and bury them at the four corners of the Earth to keep them from ever reuniting. That's how dead I want the health-care reform effort to be. And before you ask, that's also how I feel about cap-and-trade, stimulus packages, an amnesty bill and all the other crap you're trying to bury the Constitution under."