You simply cannot explain the scope and breadth of the Obamacare debacle in one column...unless your last name is Krauthammer.

As an aspiring writer and commentator, I spend a great deal of time reading the books and articles and speeches of the people I feel effectively communicate the ideas I believe in better than anyone else.

Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post and Fox News Channel is one of those people.

Every night of the week, at roughly 6:40 p.m. (Eastern Time), Dr. Krauthammer is a member of the "All-Star Panel" on Special Report With Brett Baier.  (You should be watching or DVR-ing this every day).  And each Friday, his nationally syndicated column is read in newspapers all across the country.

Today he treated his reading audience to this gem on the current state of the Pelosi-Reid-Obama health care plan:

After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health care reform.

The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House "summit" with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans' way.

Show is the operative noun. Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of Obama's health care bill.

The Health Care Summit last week was a dog-and-pony show, meant to portray the Republicans as obstructionists and big old meanies.  But the president was confronted by the likes of Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), and the fact-based disagreements conservatives have with Obama's brand of "reform."  Republicans DO have ideas, and many key members of the GOP on the state and national level have been promoting them all year.

Unfortunately for Democrats, that seven-hour televised exercise had the unintended consequence of showing the Republicans to be not only highly informed on the subject, but also, as even Obama was forced to admit, possessed of principled objections -- contradicting the ubiquitous Democratic/media meme that Republican opposition was nothing but nihilistic partisanship.

Republicans did so well, in fact, that in his summation, Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments) they are in favor.

Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?

And now, in what can only be described as the most brilliant summation of the American peoples' opposition to Obamacare, please enjoy the wit and wisdom of Charles Krauthammer in its rarest of forms:

Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.

However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed -- say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?

Perhaps something like 3-1 against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the citizenry's feeling about the current Democratic health care bills.

Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.

Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.

That's it, folks.  Everything the Left promises sounds nice on an individual level, which is how they present their collectivist policies.  The problem is, of course, that all of their policies are implemented on a national level and cannot possibly succeed.  This is the heart of the debate between Right and Left: can the few rule, and provide for, the many?  Can "experts" in Washington "control" the expenses and costs of 300 million-plus liberty-loving Americans?

The good intentions of liberals are heart-warming and bone-chilling, all at the same time.

Chuck closes out his devastatingly informative column with the following:

The time for debate is over, declared the nation's seminar leader in chief. The man who vowed to undo Washington's wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obamacare through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of "budget reconciliation." The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.

Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.

We are likely witnessing the implosion of the Democrat Party.  Think of how different things were a year ago!

The latest Democrat to abandon the proverbial sinking ship is Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN).  Writing today at National Review Online, RiShawn Biddle diagnoses what he believes to have been Senator Bayh's fatal flaw:

Certainly there is speculation that Bayh may seek the Democratic presidential nomination — or even attempt an independent presidential campaign — in 2012 or 2016. This assumes that Bayh can repeat his past success in presenting himself as one of the Democratic party’s more centrist players. But it was precisely this well-practiced fence-straddling between conservatism and liberalism that led to Bayh’s downfall. The anger and fatigue among Hoosier voters over the current recession — combined with President Obama’s unpopularity — are hurting all Democrats, but Bayh was hurt even worse by the perception among both conservatives and liberals that he stood for his own political ambitions (and occasionally, his wife’s business interests) than for any consistent ideology.

The danger of demonstrating such an absence of strong, thoughtful political positions should be kept in mind by Republicans and Democrats alike. It is often better to be principled (and even a tad ideological) to a fault than to be milquetoast by a mile.

Please understand that the precipitous decline in the popularity of Democrats among voters does not spell certain success for the GOP come 2010 and 2012.  Nor should it.  Republicans absolutely blew their chance to curtail spending, drastically cut taxes, and return our national focus to the original intent of the US Constitution.  That didn't happen.

But things can change.  Parties can change.  They change when voters show up to primaries and town halls and call/email their local representatives.  They change when voters start following their leaders and keeping score for themselves (instead of letting the media re-writer history every chance they get).

The folks in Washington are terrified of you and me.  Evan Bayh is just the latest in an increasingly long line of politicians who have read the poll numbers on the wall (so to speak) and know they are donzo.

Although he declared that his decision was motivated by his desire to escape the “strident partisanship” of the present-day Senate and his interest in finding “better ways to serve my fellow citizens,” he faced the prospect of losing the seat in the same fashion his legendary father did 30 years ago. According to internal party polls just three months ago, he was polling at 63 percent; by late January, the junior senator from Indiana had the support of a mere 45 percent of likely voters surveyed by Rasmussen Reports.

Keep up the fight, America.  Charles Krauthammer and the Fox News All-stars are behind you: