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[Ed. note: This afternoon Howie did a long post at DownWithTyranny about Blue America's first challenger for the 2012 congressional cycle, Nicholas Ruiz. In light of the House Republicans' vote to repeal health-care reform yesterday, Nicholas wrote a guest post for C&L today that fits right in with our efforts to call attention to the hypocrisy of conservative legislators voting against health care for taxpayers while keeping taxpayer-subsidized health care for themselves and their own families. Nicholas' opponent, freshman Tea Party Republican Sandy Adams, is a prime example -- thus this ad Blue America worked on with Daily Kos, Americans for America PAC and Americans United.] by Nicholas Ruiz III The diagnosis is clear: Many congressional Republicans and their highfalutin million-dollar pundits are afflicted by the disease of anorexia economica. Their obsessive fear of budgetary obesity is lopsided and distorted like one’s anorexic appearance in the carnival mirror that makes one appear ridiculously thin and wide simultaneously. For sufferers of the Reaganomic zombie variant of the malady — parts of the budgetary body are perceived to be ridiculously engorged and wide — when they are in fact, too thin and undernourished to the point of tempting national heart failure, as in for example, the budgetary aspects of the U.S. Social Safety Net and support for national funds and endowments for public education, culture, arts, humanities, and universal health care. Alternatively, the defense budget that consumes about half of all U.S. tax revenue and represents more defense spending for our one nation than almost every other nation’s defense spending combined– that budgetary addiction is perceived to be sweet as peaches, and ignored, except for the continual annual need of replenishment. In fact, such budgetary spending in defense, tax loopholes and tax cuts for behemoth corporations and the uber-fortunate, I think you will agree, are policies in need of a reasonably healthy and revitalizing diet. Republican anorexia economica is contagious and it is spreading. Everywhere, the Republican symptomology presents itself in a seemingly hynoptic-induced, drone-like mantra among sufferers such as Sandy Adams (FL-24), repeating over and over again, with little else of coherence, a tired chant that amounts to: “We have to cut the spending– we need tax cuts.” Or in the case of Michele Bachmann’s (MN-6) over-stimulated, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed paradoxical meandering on Fox News: “Nothing is on the table and nothing is off the table.” Really? How lucid. Talk about dark matter. Or in the case of Hansen Clark (MI-13) as reported by the NYTimes : “I need to be able to work up to 20 hours a day and still get some decent sleep, and if I sleep in my office I’ll be able to do that.” What kind of sense does that make? Who can actually believe that working twenty hours per day– and in sleeping in one’s office, is a healthy proposition? It’s just as we suspected. Democrats are susceptible to the disease. Or in another Republican example, the case of Joe Walsh (IL-8), again in the NYTimes : “I don’t want to think about where I’m living, I don’t want to think about what I’m eating; I want to get in, do my work and then get home and talk to the people who sent me here.” Such a new congressional binge and purge disposition borders on the obsessive and dysfunctional. Excess and scarcity combine in such collectively neurotic thinking to create record levels of poverty, unemployment, home foreclosures, war-mongering, soaring equity and commodity market prices– all coupled to artificially suppressed wages, worker rights and benefits, sociocultural and environmental devastation. It sends the wrong message to America and the world. They don’t call it the 112th Congress’ “Couch Caucus” for nothing. There is no “ObamaCare disaster.” There is only an attempt to nourish a long overdue deficiency and frailty of the U.S. Social Safety Net, which sufferers of the collective neurosis of Republican anorexia economica perceive as a horribly fat and ugly self. But as we well know, that perceived obesity, in fact, does not reflect the thin American reality of our post-FDR, Reaganite deterioration. There’s even talk of renunciation of personal healthcare among some of the worst afflicted with this disease. That some congresspersons would actually reject the offer of healthcare as a part of their remuneration for full-time employment as U.S. representatives in Congress alerts us all as to the severity of their dystopian condition. Any mental health professional will tell you, when a person no longer desires to address one’s own healthcare seriously, the neurosis is escalating. Perhaps there is a bit of hope in the collective irony, if not hypocrisy, wherein most new congressional reps have not lost all cognition in a shared dementia, and will in fact accept ObamaCare as their very own, even as they attempt to deny coverage to millions of Americans, again. Yes, most of Congress, even the Republican-majority House of Representatives will enroll in the government healthcare program, as they should, because it’s the smart, and right thing to do. Now we just have to help them get well enough to see that to extend such a universal coverage to the whole of the nation is the only civilized thing to do, no? Remember, the delusional will shed no tear for the sky becoming landfill. They will not adhere to the ethical reality of facts regarding the benefits of health for all, nor the longstanding reasonable proposition that representative government exists for the express purpose of ensuring social just, rather than draconian, law and order, and legal fairness in a commonwealth of society. They will reject and refuse to act upon the rightfully negative criticisms by the public that Republican government cannot exist solely as profiteering device for a fraction of the population, those of which are already among the most fortunate of citizens. And the answer to all of this? Put a progressive Democrat in Congress. You can donate to Nicholas’ congressional campaign directly at his website and you can donate to the Blue America/Daily Kos efforts to run the radio ad up top at our new ActBlue page .