Winning must be more than simply "saying no"

Grey Matter notes, correctly, that David Frum is one of the few conservatives out there making a rational argument about the health care reform debate:

Unlike the many kooks on his side, David Frum has at least thought a bit farther than the nose on his face:

What would it mean to “win” the healthcare fight?

For some, the answer is obvious: beat back the president’s proposals, defeat the House bill, stand back and wait for 1994 to repeat itself.

The problem is that if we do that… we’ll still have the present healthcare system.

Many on the right aren't viewing the current health care debate as an opportunity to fix something that is broken, but rather they're viewing it more as just another in a series of partisan opportunities to hopefully make Obama and the Dems look bad. That's it, to gain political points, period.

But as Frum says, even if his side "wins" this one, we'll still have the same broken system that needs fixing. However, by once again stalling with the needed remedies (first in 1994) means the problems will grow increasingly more massive in size, to the point where whenever we get around to addressing health care reform again, the cures could be so outlandishly expensive at that point that any constructive fix will be out of the question.

We saw the same thing with the stimulus debate - an outright denial by the Republicans that a problem even existed with the economy. Other than terrorism, what issue did the Bush administration try to solve, or fix, or make better for America? Anything that couldn't be deregulated was considered activism, and therefore off limits. At some point, conservatives have to stand for more than simply dismantling government, and standing in the way of much-needed reform.

It's one thing to say you disagree with Obama's plan to reform health care, it's another entirely to defend the present system. That's what the GOP mob is doing. It's yet another "Amurika moment" for them, in which national pride threatens to set us back even further as a nation. And we wonder how great nations in the past perished. Perhaps because they were a bit too hung up on how great they were, rather than on how great they could be.