Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Obamascare and other observations

This Ezra Klein commentary at the Washington Post blog site, It's Democracy, Not Health Care Reform, That's Sick, opens the door for me to respond to a number of issues emanating from the current shitstorm.

First, who are these protesters that allegedly sprang forth from a well-organized GOP weilding great power and influence over the grassroots, subsequently being branded racists by most media mouthpieces, and compared to Hitler's brownshirts by others of the same media?

I'm going out on a limb and assert that they're comprised of everyday Americans who have reached a tipping point as we sat idly by over the last year and watched our government take our money via taxes and inflation to "reward" failure on a massive scale through bailouts and handouts directed toward people and organizations who made ridiculously bad decisions, and in the process, essentially punishing those of us who played it safe, worked hard for what we have and lived within our means.

Before that, we were subjected to a government that, while under the control of our self-proclaimed "small government" representatives, rapidly metastasized into a more monstrous behemoth with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, expansion of Medicare, No Child Left Behind and other programs extending the government's tentacles ever further into our personal lives.

On this foundation of public sentiment, following the wonderful successes of NCLB and the glorious TSA, the government next wants to "fix" the country's healthcare situation, an enormous undertaking by any measure. I don't think so.

Next, when reading the Klein piece linked above, one underlying thought kept surfacing: all these people who are now expending any energy criticizing the current protests WISH they'd had the balls to disrupt town hall meetings 6-7 years ago when the evil Bush forced his wars, torture, and domestic spying programs on us. Some of this was supposed to have been ameliorated with the recent election, but alas... We might not be at this volatile point in our democracy had the people stopped the government's numerous and blatantly unconstitutional expansions then.

Putting the death panels and abortion mandates from the Party of Death aside for a moment, and intentionally ignoring the Schiavo case, let's look at one common phrase hurled at those opposing healthcare reform: "you'll just let all these people die who can't afford care?" This type of rhetoric strangely and inadvertently reveals the blemishes in the classic "evolution vs creationism" debate. Do you ever find it ironic that the liberals, or evolutionists, have spent their lives authorizing government to fight evolutionary processes, while the conservatives, or creationists, are fighting with everything they have for the freedom to let evolution play out as it may, when it comes to personal health and safety? I think history will bear out that the evolutionists will ultimately lose, or recalling a common phrase first heard as a child, you can't fight mother nature.

I mean think about it. The liberals are working so hard to erect safety nets around everything we do, sanitizing our environment of all the potentially harmful elements it contains, protecting everything, from our fragile egos to our porous skin and brittle bones. How in the world did we as humans ever survive all the harshness nature and our own fellow man threw at us, and in such massive quantities as we did, before our self-designated saviors came along? From all the rhetoric, you'd think we didn't even exist then, and won't be able to survive and flourish without them now. Used to, they'd put people suffering from such delusions of grandeur in the mental ward. Now they elect them to national office.

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