It's one thing to oppose something, entirely another to sabotage it

Every time I think politics can't get any worse, I am proven wrong.

Ever since Barack Obama won the 2008 election and became president, Republicans eschewed their role as the Loyal Opposition and decided to compromise as little as possible on as few things as possible.

Despite the fact that Obama defeated John McCain by 9.5 million votes and drew 52.9 percent of the vote -- the best showing by a candidate since Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign -- Republicans chose to treat him from the beginning as if he was an illegitimate winner.

When the Senate opposition leader says his only priority is to prevent the president's re-election, and then does everything he can to obstruct anything that might make the president look good, you have a whole new level of obstruction.

It's easy to argue Obama's priorities in devoting most of his first two years to health care reform, and Republicans used it against him quite effectively in recapturing control of the House of Representatives in 2010, but conservatives had been blocking health care reform for more than 70 years.

Things had reached the ultimate level of ridiculousness when Bill Clinton made an effort during his first term and insurance companies had spent millions in misleading advertising to shoot down his proposed reforms.

But 15 years later, the amount of money people were spending on health care had gotten so much worse that medical spending had become one-sixth of the economy. And even with that, there were more than 40 million Americans with no insurance at all.

When Michael Moore came out with "Sicko," his documentary on health care, in 2007, all of a sudden the people who had been saying the U.S. had the best health care in the world weren't going unchallenged.

Numbers from the World Health Organization rated us 38th, just behind Cuba and just ahead of Slovenia.

So Obama made it a priority, and there was meaningful health care reform for the first time since Medicare in 1965.

Of course, because Obama wanted reform to be bipartisan, so he tied himself in knots to make it palatable to Republicans and wound up with essentially the same idea the conservative Heritage Foundation had championed during the Clinton years.

Yes, there have been problems with the implementation, but most of those problems have come in Republican-ruled states that have refused to implement ACA reforms.

The irony is that Republicans have done everything they can to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, including calling it Socialism when the biggest beneficiaries of it are the insurance companies. In fact, they've reached the point where they're lying about it.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, one of the first Tea Party senators, has repeatedly told voters about his baby daughter's reconstructive heart surgery in 1982. He always ends the story by saying if "Obamacare" had been in effect then, his daughter could not have had the life-saving surgery.

Of course, that's not true. The doctor who performed the surgery explained it quite differently, and said Republican attacks on the new law were unfair and dishonest. He also said such reform that happened -- and it wasn't enough -- was of the sort that Republicans should love.

The fact is, their opposition to anything Obama proposes is almost pathological. It's only a little bit of a stretch to say that if Obama proposed making the U.S. a Christian nation, the GOP would come out in favor of Islam.

They're entitled to their own opinions.

They're not entitled to their own facts, and calling something Socialism doesn't mean that's what it is. The ACA has been a Godsend for many Americans who didn't have insurance before. I would imagine they are wondering why Republicans don't want them to have insurance.