Reconciliation as Pickett’s Charge?
The Washington Examiner has chosen a rather odd analogy for the Democrat’s decision to ram health care legislation through in spite of overwhelming public opposition: Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.
It was Pickett’s Charge of the Confederates at Gettysburg in 1863, a horrendous, bloody carnage that could have been avoided, had not their commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee, been so determined to do it his way — a massed frontal assault against a nearly impregnable position.
It is to just such a political Pickett’s Charge that President Obama now summons congressional Democrats on behalf of his health care reform proposal, a last desperate gamble to overcome a sturdy, strengthening line of Republican opposition reinforced beyond measure in recent months by the knowledge they stand with a solid majority of their countrymen. Obama and Democratic brigade commanders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi know there will be terrible casualties among their troops come November, but still they urge them on, to sacrifice their jobs, careers and political futures for … 2,700 pages of new bureaucratic rules, mandates, directives and edicts that will surely destroy the finest health care system in the world.
So this would make Obama General Lee? He’s gotta love that. Teddy Kennedy, I suppose, would be the fallen Stonewall Jackson, who might have turned the tide had he not died before the decisive battle. Harry Reid has the ponderous ego and glacial reactions of Longstreet. Nancy Pelosi will have to serve as the fashionable, jetsetting Jeb Stuart (unfortunately, she’s not absent from the scene in the early stages).
Let’s get a regiment over to hold Little Round Top, the key to the whole battlefield. I nominate Paul Ryan for the role of Chamberlain.
This whole Union thing is going to take some getting used to, but there’s something to be said for it. Overwhelming numbers, a heady dose of moral superiority, imputed innocence.
How about Billy Yank as the new Ole Miss mascot?




