The stupid thing is, Obamacare isn’t even that good. This is, after all, the Heritage Foundation’s plan, and a plan that deserved the mockery it got when it was first floated. Only a deranged lobbyist could conceive of a plan to make everyone buy private health insurance and believe that this would somehow reduce the cost of healthcare. It’s madness. And yet here we are, defending it bitterly, because this particular madness stands between Republicans and the poor and elderly, whom the Republicans would much prefer to go away and die quietly once their money has been taken away and after they dutifully vote Republican.

Yes, I’m aware that realpolitik means that working with this flawed plan is better than nothing, and that the realities of America’s pathology mean that actual improvement and reform is a generational task. And I still support Obamacare on the grounds that saving lives is important and that it is good to get Americans used to the idea that healthcare should be a right and a privilege of living in a Western society, rather than a luxury that their owners dole out to the worthy. But it still feels stupid to be defending a plan that Republicans proposed in their delusion and would happily have supported had a black man not signed it. Yet I suppose that’s literally one of the least stupid things in American politics nowadays.