As we bask in the fact that Congress finally passed health care reform, let us remember some representative quotes from the GOP:

Critics stormed that health care reform is “a cruel hoax and a delusion.”

Ads in 100 newspapers thundered that reform would mean “the beginning of socialized medicine.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page predicts that the legislation will lead to “deteriorating service.”

Business groups warned that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor.” [...]

Daniel Reed, a Republican representative from New York, predicted that with Social Security, Americans would come to feel “the lash of the dictator.”

Senator Daniel Hastings, a Delaware Republican, declared that [this program] would “end the progress of a great country.” John Taber, a Republican representative from New York, went further and said of Social Security: “Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers.”

All dire — but also wrong. Those forecasts date not from this year, but from the battle over Medicare in the early 1960s. I pulled them from newspaper archives and other accounts.

Republicans will never miss an opportunity to pump fear-steroids into the veins of Americans and later find themselves on the wrong side of history.

It’s really too bad that they chose to scream wildly about nonsense, rather than work in good faith to improve the bill. They probably could have helped make the bill even better.

But, well, that just wouldn’t be in character, now would it?

Fear is such an easier instrument to play.