Obama's efforts to reach across the aisle and make these reforms bi-partisan may have been fruitless, even misguided, but they were also heroic. And the utter rejection of those efforts by the GOP is both depressing and infuriating. I have been a Democrat more often than I have been a Republican in my life, sure, but the Republican Party that I grew up with, the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt the first president to propose a national health program, of Clifford Case and Nelson Rockefeller, of Everett Dirksen and John Lindsay and Chuck Percy and Dwight D. Eisenhower… that party is now dead, it has become clear. The nasty campaign of fear and misinformation and outright lies that the right has waged against “Obamacare,” complete with odious comparisons to Hitler ! certainly drove that point home… though perhaps one might cling to some hope that those people were just the lunatic fringe. But no. The fact that NOT ONE SINGLE REPUBLICAN voted against the party line is damning more than thirty Democrats crossed the other way, by comparison. Today's GOP has abandoned all pretense of serving the people or attempting to redress the country's problems. Today's GOP belongs to the religious fundamentalists, the loonies and the haters, the lobbyists for the banks and corporations, and the very military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned against in his farewell speech. They proved that tonight.