To the trenches! (Overblown) reactions on health care

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To hear the Democrats tell it, you'd think we just cured cancer. Or, if you're conservative, we've just condemned everyone to hell.

Republicans are acting like a mob in one of those old black & white Frankenstein movies -- waving pitchforks and torches and vowing to slay the beast.

Democrats are dancing around like it's V-J Day, drunk on power, kissing strangers. You'd almost expect any minute to see Joe Biden in a sailor suit bending Nancy Pelosi over in Times Square.

Both sides are rushing to the newly drawn battle lines over the Affordable Care Act.

Mitt Romney's reaction was quick and (considering the federal law is practically a carbon copy of the health care act he signed into law in Massachusetts) political. He took to a Washington rooftop with the Capitol visible behind him.

"What the court did not do on its last day in session, I will do on my first day if elected president of the United States," he said. "And that is, I will act to repeal Obamacare."

Instead of being angry, though, a lot of Republican politicians couldn't hide their glee. The Supreme Court decision gave them just what they needed to whip conservative voters into a frenzy.

"Thank you, Scotus," former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska posted on her Facebook page. "This Obamacare ruling fires up the troops as America's eyes are opened! Thank God."

She's right. Within three hours of the Supreme Court¿s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul told Fox News Latino that some 10,000 donors had pumped $1 million in contributions into his campaign.

"The Supreme Court's decision is actually a tremendous windfall because it reminds people viscerally about the law," Steven Law, president of the conservative group Crossroads GPS, told the New York Times. "It takes the centerpiece of it and declares it a massive tax on the middle class, and it will refocus people on the particular provisions of the bill that they don¿t like and fear."

The Democrats, too, were diving into the battle trenches, ready to wage war again, and draping the decision in hyperbole.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez painted the decision as a matter of life and death.

"This will literally help people live who before this law," the Illinois Democrat said in an emailed statement, "if they were sick and couldn't afford care or couldn't switch health policies, were sentenced to death or poverty or both."

Gutierrez, of course, is known for his passion -- about just about everything.

But the generally more reserved Bob Menendez of New Jersey issued a statement that cast the ruling in monumentally historic terms.

"This decision is a victory for every American who has been waiting decades for a health care system that is about accessible, affordable health care and not about padding the bottom line of insurance companies," he said. "And I will oppose Republican efforts to repeal the consumer protections that would take us back to the days when insurance companies had free rein to do whatever they wanted."

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker who became the conservatives' second most hated person (behind Obama) at least partly because of her 2010 battle to pass ACA, told the New York Times.

"The politics be damned. This is about what we came to do."

Politics, though, won't be damned. Both sides know that the Supreme Court ruling just upped the ante. The battle over ACA is far from over. And as they're already showing, they definitely have a new rallying cry -- on both sides.