Senate Republicans, like all Republicans on Capitol Hill areobstructionists when it comes to legislation for the common good,supportive only of government of, by, and for the wealthy few thatincludes themselves; everyone else is on their own.

This GOP destructive obstructionism was evident again yesterdayduring the attempted debate of Senator Bernie Sanders' (I-VT) amendmentwhich would have provided "health care and dental coverage for every American, save money, and improve health care results."

From Senator Sanders' Newsroom: "Breaking with Senate tradition, Republicans demanded the clerk of theSenate read every word of the 767 page proposal.  Sanders decided topull the amendment rather than let opponents further delay action onhealth reform legislation.  Sanders laid out the case in an impassioned floor speechand reacted to the obstruction tactics. "The fact that 17 percent ofour people are unemployed or underemployed, one out of four of ourchildren are living on food stamps, we've got two wars, we've gotglobal warming, we have a $12 trillion national debt, and the best theRepublicans can do is try to bring the United States government to ahalt by forcing a reading of a 700 page amendment.  That is anoutrage.  People can have honest disagreements, but in this moment ofcrisis it is wrong to bring the United States government to a halt."

"The 1,300 profit-making private insurance companies administerthousands of separate plans and waste about $400 billion a year onadministrative costs, profiteering, high CEO compensation packages, andadvertising. Health care providers spend another $210 billion onadministrative costs, mostly to deal with insurance paperwork.  As aresult, the United States spends $7,129 per person on health care,almost double the amount spent by nearly any other industrializedcountry. Nevertheless, 46 million Americans lack health insurance, 100million Americans cannot access dental care, and 60 million Americansdo not have access to primary care."

Andthese always-no-to-the-common-good Republicans will have the audacityto lie to the American electorate while feigning "populism."

Johann Hari writes at the The Independent about the delusional and fact denying/ignoring GOP.

"The US is the only major industrialised countrythat does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead,they are required to provide for themselves – and 50 million peoplecan't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die everyyear needlessly, because they can't access the care they require.That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet theRepublicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all thisdeath by extending healthcare of being "killers" – and they havesuccessfully managed to put them on the defensive.

"TheRepublicans want to defend the existing system, not least because theyare given massive sums of money by the private medical firms whobenefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical systemthat doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to makeany life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved."

GOP liars have been successful....recall their prevaricating claims of "death panels."

Hari continues: "frenzied claims have become so detached fromreality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazineUS Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British,he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist"healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he isBritish, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".

"Thistendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy worldisn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bushyears like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that SaddamHussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimedthey had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence forman-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as oneRepublican congressman put it – that it was "the greatest hoax in humanhistory", and that all the world's climatologists were 'liars". TheAmerican media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rivalsides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

"Something strange has happened in America in the nine months sinceBarack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedianBill Maher: 'The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicanshave moved to a mental hospital.'

"....Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason.  He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate theelite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they arestirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companiesthat an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of governmentas a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying inpublic that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challengingthese hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has triedto flatter and soothe them.

"This kind ofmania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes inpolitics you will have enemies, and they must be democraticallydefeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reachout to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is noway to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and theRepublicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, 'It is asthough, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you hadto bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make themagree. It's not how change happens.' "

WhileDemocrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House have been acting morelike Republicans, the actual GOP is, unfortunately, even worse.

The American electorate needs to become moresavvy, identifying and supporting candidates who are realdemocrats/Democrats not DINOs and rejecting Republicans whose ongoingphilosophy embraces deregulated, laissez-faire economic casino for thebenefit of the greedy, wealthy few and hypocritically promotes raw orcoded bigotry and prejudice among the people, especially thosestruggling in the difficult economic crisis that Republicans created.