Repetitive activity is always a kind of meditation for me, whether it’s playing mindless computer games and letting the mind wander, or currently, spackling the top edges of three out of four walls in my daughter’s room where previous owners were to lazy to do it right before applying molding painted fire engine red, against the ceiling painted dark blue. I have two walls to go, and am taking a break. And I can’t feel my elbow, especially after divesting the same walls from the ugliest glow in the dark rocket ship wallpaper border I have ever seen.

But I digress. Repetitive activity=busy brain. So I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of compromise, particularly in the realm of health care reform, and I’m more and more convinced that consensus, while possibly desirable, just can’t happen here. When you have Glenn Beck screeching on national television about the conspiracy between Obama and ACORN to create an oligarchy (well, “oligarhy,” to quote him directly) and people are still listening and nodding and feeling like victims because they’re sure health care reform = socialism and death panels and the end of the world because maybe insurance companies won’t be allowed to cheat people quite as much as they can now, I don’t know how consensus is even a word in the conversation any more.

It is so frustrating for me, as a thinking human being, when so many people are willingly going off the deep end, regardless of the facts. So no, I don’t think we should compromise with crazy people when it comes to health care reform.

This is not to say that everyone who is opposed to the specific reforms the Democrats are proposing is crazy, because there are all kinds of good ideas and valid viewpoints around the facts. But when it comes to the purely fear-driven obstructionist crap that is being presented as “the other side,” I think it’s time to call bullshit and move on without it.

The New York Times agrees with me this morning:

If the Democrats want to enact health care reform this year, they appear to have little choice but to adopt a high-risk, go-it-alone, majority-rules strategy.

We say this with considerable regret because a bipartisan compromise would be the surest way to achieve comprehensive reforms with broad public support. But the ideological split between the parties is too wide — and the animosities too deep — for that to be possible.

In recent weeks, it has become inescapably clear that Republicans are unlikely to vote for substantial reform this year. Many seem bent on scuttling President Obama’s signature domestic issue no matter the cost. As Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, so infamously put it: “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

So while it’s unfortunate, it’s time to put up or shut up. And any sane Republicans who have a chance to break with the crazies who are currently controlling their party’s message need to put up as well. I would think that in the end, those who are on the side of reasonable, much-needed, sensible health care reform will have a better chance of being reelected than those who insist on just getting in the way in order to score cheap political points.

Now I must go back to the spackle.