I don't think their primary goal is to make Obama a "failed president." Any President is going to have things that go well and things that go badly, and the amount of blame and credit will depend on who is judging. For his political opponents, the slow economic recovery and the passing of health insurance reform will be sufficient to mark him a failure in their minds. They do honestly want to repeal the health insurance law. It's likely that they have a sort of doomsday belief that it will cause so much economic harm that any attempt to overturn it is worthwhile, but I doubt that they're willing to sink the whole ship in order to get rid of a few rats. Stuff like the "government shutdown" and the "crisis" over the debt ceiling is really more posturing than anything else, though the former does have real consequences that congressfolk aren't terribly concerned about IMO.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
