In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

The shattering on the right continues. All because of the Obamacare defunding attempt. The smart ones are in a tizzy. For Jonah Goldberg it’s the Con Factor. For Charles Krauthammer it’s the Theater Factor. For Karl Rove it’s the Electoral Suicide Factor. For Mitch McConnell it’s the “I’ll share my oppo research on him” Factor. For John McCain it’s the “I hate his fucking guts” Factor. I could go on…

But I have a proposition of my own. What if it’s the Truth Factor?

See if you can follow my logic, which doesn’t seem to have the same fault line as the smart guys’.

The criticisms aren’t based on defenses of ObamaCare. They’re based on the idea that the defunding attempt is bad tactics and/or bad strategy because it carries the implicit threat of government shutdown. But historically, people barely notice a shutdown, just like they’ve barely noticed the sequester. They may yell about it to pollsters but they’ll forget about it before they remember to hold a grudge about it.

So why are the smart guys so anxious? They see everything as a congressional poker game where you look like a fool if you go all in and lose. They’re in a panic that the Democrats will humiliate Republicans in the event of some temporary government shutdown, which would imperil the opportunity to hold the house and reclaim the senate in 2014. What they forget is that a shutdown would be much more exciting to them than to us. All the checks to people will keep coming regardless. End of story.

They’re full of it. Their view is strictly inside the beltway myopia. Demonstrating just how out of touch they are.

Truth. The country, the economy, people’s health care situations, foreign policy, trust in government itself, and faith in the integrity of our leadership and the rule of law are all imploding so quickly that no 2014 election will be determined by what Ted Cruz is doing right now to stop ObamaCare.

When there is no sign on any front that things are getting better, and when most signs indicate that everything is getting worse for the nation as a whole and for people individually, there is no spin possible that can blame it all on Republican obstruction.

Especially on the subject of ObamaCare. Doesn’t matter what today’s polls are saying. By 2014, the majority of people, the ones who pay the taxes and the bills, will have discovered that healthcare for their families has become a huge effective tax increase and that the real costs, in terms of time invested, declining quality of care, and flat-out worry, have escalated substantially. While everything else was going to hell except for the stock portfolios of DC’s incestuous Wall Street cronies. And the salaries of their most generous lobbyists.

That’s the fault line. It’s not between parties. Where the smart guys have missed the boat. It’s between the people and the incredibly affluent and insulated Washington establishment. During the Obama years the only increase in prosperity has been in the nation’s capital. More federal bureaucrats making more money and acquiring more power and immunity from consequence while life got steadily harder for everyone else.

How all the scandals the media keep dismissing will come home to roost. In the end it won’t even matter that nobody knows what happened with Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS, the NSA, and all the other instances of corruption in the current administration. What will shake out in the final analysis is that nobody has ever been held accountable for anything. Which isn’t their own experience of life.

You see, there is a point at which people say, “Hey. There are different rules for government folks than me. Time to send them home.”

That’s also the point at which they might remember that Ted Cruz was the most hated man in Washington, DC, when he said ObamaCare was a stake in our hearts and has to be fought every inch of the way to implementation. Hmmmm.

To believe that he’s a fool is actually to believe that ObamaCare might really succeed and make people happy.

Another way of saying that people who are philosophically and pragmatically opposed to ObamaCare are so cowed by the administration spin and its echo chamber in the MSM that they’ve lost the courage of their own convictions. Meaning they have lost touch with everything important about life outside the beltway.

When the ObamaCare implementation hits, it will precipitate an accelerating disaster for every demographic. Doctors will retire, hospitals will downsize, insurance companies will be squeezed into dropping the low end affordable policies many counted on, and young people will pay the fine rather than the tithe the government was counting on to fund the whole enterprise. Why it will be bankrupt from the start and quality of care will plummet not gradually but dramatically to rationing and death by paperwork.

So Ted Cruz led a quixotic effort against terrific odds to stop the locomotive before it hurtled off the tracks. By 2016 that could make him a hero.

The effort hasn’t been a charade. What Cruz has accomplished: he’s forced the Democrats to defend a program that will materially hurt almost everyone, even in the short term. Which means he’s also provided electoral cover for Republicans who were more equivocal in their opposition to ObamaCare. At least they weren’t the Democrats who were pretending that a disaster is a Great Leap Forward.

Elections are always a choice between the lesser of two evils. All but the worst of RINOs will be glad of Cruz’s offensive by November of 2014. At which time they can claim they supported him in spirit.

If you disagree, describe the State of the Union that will obtain in November 2014. Probable recession, expanding foreign policy failure and disgrace, simmering scandals that ultimately disgust because this administration never comes clean about anything, and exponentially increasing uncertainty about personal privacy and the future of family health costs.

Unless that’s all going to get magically better almost overnight. Tell me how much you believe that.