Gimmicks, contd

When the opposition uses gimmicks and lies to oppose you, feel confident you're on the right side of the issue. Coming up with valid arguments against the current reform efforts is quite possible by thoughtful people on the left and the right, but Congressional Republicans aren't those kind of people. In this case, the joke is on the GOP: by using the printed out bill as a prop to try to make a pseudo-argument that any very long bill is a very bad bill, they continue to establish themselves as the Party of Beavis and Butthead. Retarded arguments make a party look retarded.


As I've pointed out before: Republicans love criticizing the length of the bill, as if that's a valid argument. Legislative bills are printed up with huge margins, large font, numbered lines and double spacing. This causes them to be much lengthier than typical reading material. A recent analysis by the AP finds that the length of the healthcare reform bill is actually about 209 normal pages:

Actually, Leo Tolstoy's tome [War and Peace] is longer than either bill. Full translated versions are nearly twice as long.

The bill passed by the House is 319,145 words. The Senate bill is 318,512 words, shorter than the House version despite consuming more paper. Various versions of Tolstoy's novel are 560,000 to 670,000 words. Bush's education act tallied more than 280,000 words.

By now, the full draft of Reid's bill that had circulated in the corridors and landed so prominently on Republican desks has been published in the Congressional Record in the official and conventional manner.

The type is small and tight. No hernias will be caused by moving this rendering of the bill around. Unfurling it on the Capitol steps would not be much of a spectacle.

It's 209 pages.

That's less than Palin's new 400+ page book. I guess the GOP should be against that, too...?