When John Ensign is not attend­ing Promise Keeper meet­ings, or hold­ing forth against the threats that gay mar­riage poses to het­ero­sex­ual mar­riage, or cheat­ing on his wife with a mar­ried staffer, or fend­ing off that staffer’s husband’s black­mail threats, he occa­sion­ally falls into a revery of unwit­ting hon­esty from which the things that he and his col­leagues have been doing their best to con­ceal for months froth out. During dis­cus­sion lead­ing to today’s vote against adding a public option to the Baucus Sham Health­care Plan, Ensign sud­denly cleared the air (from the Times):

Senator John Ensign, Repub­li­can of Nevada, said he feared that a gov­ern­ment plan would prove so pop­u­lar it could never be uprooted. “Does any­body believe Con­gress would let this public plan go away once it has a con­stituency?” Mr. Ensign asked. “No way. Once it’s started, you will never get rid of it. Con­gress will sub­si­dize it more and more, allow it to grow and grow.”

And all this time I thought we were fight­ing to pre­vent the gov­ern­ment from taking from us every­thing that we hold dear.