Reporting the latest on the efforts of congressional Republicans to delay Obamacare and enact Mitt Romney’s economic agenda or else they shutdown the whole shebang, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch quotes Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2):

“The American people don’t want a shutdown. But you know what? The American people are ready for a fight,”said Wagner, noting polls showing diminishing support for the Affordable Care Act.

“The president is willing to negotiate with everybody form [sic] the Russians to the Syrians to the Iranians. But he won’t sit down with ‘we the people’,” Wagner asserted in an interview.

What is it with these people? Does Wagner think she has some kind of spiritual power that allows her to channel the wishes of the the “American people”; what makes her so sure that we’re ready for a “fight” about Obamacare or anything else on the GOP wish list. If so, her channel is out of kilter since I’m an American and she definitely doesn’t speak for me or for most of the people I know. Which leads me to believe that her too grandiose speech habits reflect simple hubris – or that she’s trying to kick sand in our eyes so we can’t see that nobody is backing her up.

Wagner tries to justify her presumption by citing polls that show a majority disapproves of the ACA. Of course, even though media types rarely bring the fact up, based on other, earlier polls with different questions, almost everyone knows that at least a fourth to a third of the people who disapprove of the ACA do so because it lacks a single-payer or public option. They’re the “socialists” who didn’t get their way, Tea Party claims to the contrary, though, unlike the Tea Partiers, few of them would derail the healthcare reform we did get out of spite – hence the other polls that show that only a small minority support the GOP hostage tactics. In fact, a recent Pew poll found only 23% of Americans in fact want Wagner’s fight:

Take a look at that chart and tell me how Wagner can feel free to make such extravagant claims about what Americans want?

And what the holy crap does Wagner mean when she says that the President won’t sit down with “we the people” to negotiate? It’s true that he says he won’t negotiate with the Tea Party terrorists in congress – and the rest of the Tea Party whipped GOP – who want to hold the economy hostage to an agenda that lost at the polls in 2012. However, last I heard, these losers don’t have exclusive rights to that phrase. So, no matter how infuriating Wagner’s inaccurate appropriation of the constitutional phrase is, if “we the people” is a shout-out to the Tea Party, we better hope she’s right.