Turd Crud and his ilk, to them self awareness, like hypocrisy or shame, is elusive.
Must come with the greed gene which is in abundance with these effers.
They remind me of spoiled children.

Ernie pointed out:

Unlike "Obamacare", a private health insurance operation merely overseen by the government, the VA healthcare system that Cruz was advocating for, actually is a full-blown, government-run healthcare system. Or, as the heroic Republicans now like to deride it: A government takeover of healthcare!

I have read in military journals about their innate confusion about health care:

The U.S. military keeps searching the horizon for a peer competitor, the challenger that must be taken seriously. Is it China? What about an oil rich and resurgent Russia?

But the threat that is most likely to hobble U.S. military capabilities is not a peer competitor, rather it is health care.

(quoting Nat. Def. Mag.). They also seem to be confused about "government" because one of their famous quips is to make government small enough "to drown in a bathtub." (ibid). Seems like Floridiot has it down pat.

Okay, Sen. Cruz. I'm game. How about free VA, government-run, healthcare for everyone!

Offer that and I'm sure progressives will readily agree to a repeal of ObamaCare.

This whole government shutdown/fiscal cliff (part 10) is a fault of many structural problems with our government, but to me the main problem is that it is because we have a two party system. If we had a multi-party system and one party decided it wanted to go off the edge and try to destroy the government, the other parties would just ignore them, re-organize the government to quarantine the ridiculousness and allow the government to continue. Since we only allow/take seriously only two parites and one of them has decided to go off the deep end our government has fallen into disfunction even though the party causing the disfunction has only limited power in the system. We need to repeal any laws that limit the number of parties and how a party is able to gain relevance.

Alex -

To be clear, I don't care for the two-party duopoly any more than you do. Though I'm not sure we can blame that, specifically, for the current idiocy in Congress. In fact, that fact that one party is now, essentially, cut into two (crazy extremist RWers & moderately less crazy RWers who are acceding to the former's demands here) would seem to underscore the probs that would be inherent in a more multi-party system.

The other side of the argument, of course (yours, here), is that in such a case, the Less-Crazy Party might be willing to more easily abandon the Extremist-Crazy Party. But, in doing so, they'd also be marginalizing themselves at the same time.

So, again, not sure that the duopoly is the problem in this particular case, but I'm open to more explanation of your theory.

You also said...

We need to repeal any laws that limit the number of parties and how a party is able to gain relevance.

There are no such "laws" to my knowledge, even though the system is obviously built by the two major parties in ways that tend to benefit the two major parties. Much of that benefit, however, is merely built in the minds of Americans (reinforced regularly by the corporate media) who are told that 3rd Parties can't win, etc. That's absurd, of course (just ask Jesse Ventura), but still, Americans have been led to believe that they will get a prize if they pick the winner in an election, so voting for a third party, somehow, is a "wasted" vote. Absurd, of course, but the conventional wisdom on that point is very difficult to combat, unfortunately.