Political Lines Drawn in the Sand. . . .

. . . don’t do much good for anyone.

Nonetheless, if there were an annual Intransigence Award for such behavior, I think that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and President Barack Obama would be vying for the top prize. 

Why split hairs?  Let’s have each nominee share the honors, as is sometimes the practice when awarding the Nobel Prize for a specific category.

President Shares Top Honor:  Barack Obama drew a line in the sand not so long ago, when he threatened to embroil this nation once more in one of the never-ending eruptions within The Middle East.

He was going to bomb Syria, remember? 

After an unsuccessful attempt to solidify international military and political backing for U.S. missile strikes over Syria with which the U.S. had no business, Obama kept moving his line in the sand further and further back until his feet became stuck in the quicksand of non-support at home and abroad. 

It took an unlikely rescue by Russian President Vladimir Putin to erase Obama’s quixotic stance. 

Putin, an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, proposed and convinced Assad to agree to a U.N. plan to allow the identification and destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, and to acquiesce to a verification process. 

The guided bombs didn’t fly, and Putin’s cunning chess move seems to be working, 

Senator Joins President to Share Top Honor:  The proposed co-honoree for the annual Intransigence Award of the year goes to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) who made one of the biggest political blunders of anyone in the U.S. Senate.

Cruz is the man who talked the GOP leadership into a futile attempt to defund the Affordable Care Act that took effect October 1^st.  This was a colossal blunder by the man from Texas.

Foremost was the likelihood that Cruz’s proposal had absolutely nowhere to go.  The statistical probability that his efforts might succeed ranged from 0% to 0.1%, a virtual impossibility.

The arithmetic behind this is simple:  In order to defund the Affordable Care Act, not only would all of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate have had to stand unified, but Cruz would have needed to convince at least five Democrats to get on board in order to assure Senate passage.

That is also assuming that Cruz could convince the House of Representatives to go along, some of whose members were already preparing to walk away.

Even if both branches of Congress had concurred to defund the Affordable Care Act, the bill was doomed to a veto the moment it landed on Obama’s desk.

Instead, what Cruz achieved was to minimize himself in the eyes of most Americans. 

More to the point, he succeeded in distracting all of us from the real problem that began on October 1^st; namely, the mega-millions, hydra-headed, systems design failure of undetermined proportions that is now crippling implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Building bi-partisan support for a one-year delay of the ACA rollout is the more sensible strategy that Senator Cruz should have adopted – not a doomed-to-fail defunding attempt.