A helpful reminder from Erick Erickson at RedState:

"Congressmen, this is about shutting down Obamacare.

Democrats keep talking about our refusal to compromise. They don’t realize our compromise is defunding Obamacare. We actually want to repeal it.

This is it. Our endgame is to leave the whole thing shut down until the President defunds Obamacare. And if he does not defund Obamacare, we leave the whole thing shut down.

After all, if the government is not spending any money, when we collide with the debt ceiling in two weeks, we should not have to worry since the government is spending so little money....

Congressmen, do not underestimate our desire to toss you out of office if you betray us. We are learning a lot more about government and it confirms just how wasteful it is. But this is a fight about Obamacare. Do not confuse why you are fighting.

Hold the line. Undermine Obamacare. Shut it down."

Keep all that in mind when you hear Republicans complain that President Obama will not negotiate with them. The only thing they care to negotiate with him are the terms of his abject surrender. This time, they intend to be Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse, the leader with the weaker army, accepting the sword of U.S. Grant.

But in a larger, more important sense, Erickson is wrong: This is not about shutting down ObamaCare. This is about a political minority with grandiose dreams about itself, attempting to seize power not by winning elections -- it has proved it cannot do so -- but by threatening to do harm to the country. For all the attention paid to ObamaCare, it is merely the ransom demanded of this year's episode of hostage-taking. In previous years, the tactic has been targeted at federal spending, or protecting tax cuts for the rich.

And next year? If this tactic is allowed to succeed with ObamaCare, the ransom in next year's hostage-taking might be privatizing Social Security or Medicare, or gutting the Department of Education or the EPA. The outside groups that are pushing this fight -- Heritage Action, Club for Growth, Senate Conservatives Fund, FreedomWorks and many others -- are not going to just pack it in should they somehow manage to defeat ObamaCare. Like the conservative entertainment complex of which Erickson is a part, they now constitute an industry.

Rather than power down their computers, retire their email fundraising lists and let their lease lapse on their Arlington office space should they somehow win the ObamaCare fight, they're going to look for a new cause that allows them to frighten and inflame and anger, and then to gorge themselves on that anger and fear. That's what they do and who they are. That is their profession.

This is about whether the voices of the loud but relatively few will be allowed to dominate. This is about how -- and indeed whether -- we are to govern ourselves.

But let's talk a little about ObamaCare.

Yesterday, we got another look at the nihilism and fundamental dishonesty driving this effort. In a press conference with U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid was egregiously misquoted as saying that he didn't care whether some imaginary cancer-stricken child might be denied treatment at the National Institutes of Health because of the shutdown. (For a straightforward accounting of what Reid actually said, read Dylan Byers at Politico.)

The misquote became instant fodder for the outrage machine. Drudge highlighted it. Fox delighted in it. FreedomWorks incorporated it into its fundraising, under the headline "Harry Reid: No help for cancer kids". "How out-of-touch and heartless can Senate Democrats be?" the National Republican Senatorial Committee asked.

Let's take a step back and think about this. Let's pretend that Reid actually did say and mean what he is accused of saying. If I understand this correctly, conservatives believe that this imaginary child with cancer has some kind of right to government-funded health care through NIH, and that the heartless Reid is denying him or her this government-funded treatment. Do I have that right?

It gets better: Under sequestration budget cuts that President Obama and his fellow Democrats have begged the Republicans to reconsider, the NIH has been forced to slash $1.7 billion from its 2013 budget. It was forced to cancel 700 research grants to scientists doing cutting-edge work. And it was forced to deny admission to the NIH Clinical Center to some 750 real-life, actual patients. If it is heartless and out-of-touch to deny treatment to one cancer patient, what do you say to a party that denies it to 750?

If left unaddressed, sequestration's impact on the NIH will be even more profound in fiscal 2014.

And of course, even that doesn't begin to plumb the true depths of hypocrisy. While conservatives accuse Reid of callous heartlessness by denying government-funded health care to a single imaginary kid with cancer, they battle to deny health insurance to 30 million of our fellow Americans. Here in Georgia alone, Gov. Nathan Deal has refused to extend Medicaid coverage to 650,000 lower-income Georgians. How many of them, including children, might have cancer or other life-threatening illnesses that are going undetected and untreated because they can't afford a simple checkup?

Apparently, the right is driven by some Stalinesque logic that one patient denied government health care is a tragedy, while 30 million is a mere statistic. Myself, I don't think of them that way.