BLAHBLAHCARE.

You smart folks have probably noticed that the GOP's American Health Care Act that's supposed to repeal and replace Obamacare neither repeals not replaces it, but keeps it dead-alive as a horrible zombie to kill as many Americans as possible.

You may have noticed, too, that having to finally show their cards after eight years of bullshitting -- the political equivalent of locking yourself in the studio for years working on your double-album masterpiece, and emerging with a boombox tape of bathtub farts -- seems to have deranged top Republicans. They're saying all kinds of crazy shit, and I mean crazier than usual, like bugfuck crazy. There's HHS Secretary Tom Price's back-asswards "Medicaid is a program that by and large has decreased the ability for folks to gain access to care." There's Jason Chaffetz's suggestion to Americans greedily lamenting the loss of their coverage that "maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest it in their own health care" (for which he delivered a classic non-apology after people got mad).  There's the steady stream of breath-cooled butter turds emerging from the mouth of Paul Ryan, etc.

Normally in situations like this the politicians say anodyne nothings and leave it up to the propagandists to embarrass themselves. Mind you, those rightbloggers who did find the courage to emerge from their spider holes, or were pushed, did bucket-foot it: take Dan MacLaughlin, who at National Review is forced to admit the bill has to be a mess because people won't like having their coverage wrenched away and their fingers have to be broken one at a time before they'll let go:

A total and immediately effective repeal with no backup plan would create losers who would be angry and sympathetic. A lot of the distortion in the intra-Republican healthcare debate – including the Rube Goldberg nature of the already-being-rewritten House plan and the demands by Senate moderates to protect people covered by Medicaid expansion - is driven not by a desire to produce the best plan for the country’s future, but rather by a desire to address the difficulty of transitioning out of the bind created by Obamacare’s entrenchment over the past four years. That’s understandable and necessary – conservatives take the world as it already is...

One imagines the American people saying, "Um, I'm right here."  (Oh, and if you want to see even worse, check out his colleague Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke arguing that what's really needed is a better communications strategy. Remember when that was supposed to be Trump's genius?)

This general derangement has, I'm afraid, a simple explanation. Everyone involved knows the bill is garbage. The Leader continues to yammer how great, so great, you'll love it, etc., but no one believes him -- except for that relatively small core of living Twitter eggs who were called deplorables back before it was decided This Is Why Trump Won so we better let them wreck the country in peace.

Because anyone else they talk to either laughs at them or tells them to get fucked, the GOP have to focus on these guys. So that's who they talk to. And to them they talk the political equivalent of baby talk -- angry, vicious baby talk. That's what Price and Chaffetz and Ryan and all of them (including I guess Cooke, who I doubt is dumb enough to believe that a bill with several non-financial aspects can actually be passed in "reconciliation") are doing. It doesn't have to make sense. It just has to keep Junior happy. That's why this ridiculous bill actual devotes several pages to how the government will take money back from Medicaid recipients if they win the lottery. To you it seems crazy, a non sequitur, but to the eggs, it's hell no, you ain't givin' mah money to no lottery winners, they don't need it! If they could have gotten away with a No Medicaid Fer Muslims Nor Coloreds section, believe me, they would have, so they did the closest thing they could manage.

And nothing else they do is going make any more sense than that. Hell, the final bill may be written in actual gibberish, or pictograms, or assembled from images cut out of magazines like a dream board. Reason has never been their friend, and now they've learned to embrace its opposite.

UPDATE. See the title of this thing? I rest my case.