Obamacare Blowback Begins

On its first day, millions of Americans flood web sites and phone lines to ask about health coverage the Tea Party has shut down the government to destroy.

Technical glitches aside, have Boehner’s bullies been hoisted by their own petard or, to be less Shakespearian, shot themselves in the foot?

The Affordable Care Act, with all its imperfections, looks less like tyranny to those millions than an opportunity to get health insurance for themselves and their families at reasonable rates. Messy as the process may be, they seem eager to embrace what the GOP radicals promise to oppose with their dying breaths.

As ugly as the shutdown is, it will be seen more as farce than tragedy if voters start enrolling in large numbers for Obamacare. Or is that what its Tea Party would-be destroyers have secretly been fearing all along?

As Ted Cruz apologizes to Filipino veterans for comparing the Act to the Bataan Death March in his pseudo-filibuster last week, negotiations go on for a face-saving exit from the Congressional impasse.

But Democrats may not be eager to cooperate as Sen. Dianne Feinstein sees her party gaining more leverage in the debt-limit fight as the  shutdown lengthens. Of the GOP buffoons, she observes, “They are effectively hurting themselves big time.”

Meanwhile, the surge of eager applicants for Cruz’s Death March goes on not only at the federal level but in states that have not hobbled the new law.

At the end of the day, the funeral is much more likely to be for the Tea Party than Obamacare.