McCain Letter

This is a letter to the editor I sent to National Review during the Republican presidential primary fight. Ramesh Ponnuru was singing the praises of John McCain. I am posting it here because it is a good example of why in many areas so called moderation should not be tolerated. At the end of the letter I say that if McCain is nominated it will be time for some creative destruction. Here we are over 18 months later and that process has begun. We shall all be the beneficiaries.

It was shocking to read Ramesh Ponnuru's NR cover story, The Coming McCain Moment. In order to properly understand John McCain, a few modifications and additions to the article are needed.

McCain was a member of The Keating Five, where he traded influence for campaign contributions. It was long ago, but it plants a seed of doubt as to his willingness to sell influence.

Ponnuru says "He supported a scheme of taxes and regulations to fight smoking"...It was a scheme all right, hatched in the back rooms of liberal politicians and trial lawyers. McCain was the point man for legislation and the trial lawyers to punish American Corporations that had not only been operating legally, but had been given a hold harmless by the congress and the Surgeon General by virtue of warning labels on cigarette packages. This was a blatant attack on private property and a classic abuse of government power. It created a government backed feeding frenzy among trial lawyers costing (mostly the poor) billions of dollars, and provided a wealth of talking points for Democratic operatives.

Ponnuru says campaign finance reform is not the issue it once was. Perhaps he is right. But should conservatives support McCain who sponsored this restriction on free speech, enhancing the unelected Democratic media's power? By lending his name and support, the media misleadingly represented the bill as bipartisan. Bush's abandonment of principle by signing the bill in no way excuses McCain's part.

McCain fought Bush on interrogation methods for suspected terrorists. The author charitably explains this as a principled act resulting in part from his being a POW in Vietnam. I am not so charitable. I see this and many other positions he adopts as attempts to ingratiate himself to the mainstream media by joining in their Bush bashing flavor of the month.

McCain's support of "free market solutions" (lol) to global warming is somehow seen by the author as "more prescient than most conservatives." This presupposes global warming needs a "solution". Many disagree, and even under the highly questionable assumption that global warming is man made, and under the further questionable assumption that it will be harmful, nothing proposed by any group, McCain and Kyoto included, would make any meaningful change in the warming trend. McCain's position does however, once again, give ammunition to the enemy.

"McCain has never voted for a general tax increase" says Ponnuru. He surely advocated one. In the 2000 presidential campaign he took a page from the basic Democratic playbook and argued that we should raise taxes on the rich. I don't know if his understanding of economics is so poor that he believed it would be a good thing, or if he was trying to score cheap political points, but either one is roundly unattractive. It may not be a vote to increase taxes, but when he voted against the Bush tax cuts he got in bed with increases first cousin.

In 2000 McCain trashed Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. These men are/ were not perfect, but they represent a wide constituency and have done tremendous good for their followers and all Americans. Recently he went after Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, two highly ethical, highly accomplished, great Americans. If he believes what he said, he is out of step with the people in his own party. If he driven by political calculations, one must question his rationality.

How many of these misconceived initiatives can be excused as the behavior of a maverick, or a principled maverick as the press would say? Irrespective of Ponnuru's assertions to the contrary, he disagrees with far too many basic conservative principles. Should Republicans look the other way in order to get this RINO elected? Is he a political opportunist, or simply out of touch, and does it matter? If McCain is the best Republican hope, it is certainly time for some creative destruction.

John McCain's record indicates he is better qualified to be president of Moveon.org than President of the United States.

Michael Sall, Villanova PA

Ideologues...A Breath of Fresh Air

A friend asked me to contribute to a candidate for the House's campaign and said "He is not an ideologue." I said "Too bad...is there anything good you can say about him?" Who ever got the idea that compromising or abandoning one's values, or worse, not having any values to begin with, is a virtue. Arlen Spector is not an ideologue, and neither is John McCain. What they are is chameleons. Their ship flies no flag, but they are not ideologues.

This idea reminds me of those who take it as a priori that moderation is a virtue. Many years ago Barry Goldwater (One of the founders of the modern conservative movement) said "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"

Goldwater was an absolute ideologue, and one with all the right ideas. Would you trust your possessions, or more importantly your freedom, to an ideologue like him, or McCain and Spector?

McCain and Spector claim to be moderates. Antony Scalia, one of the most thoughtful jurists ever to sit on the bench of the Supreme Court, answered a question posed to him about moderation in interpreting the law. He asked the questioner, "What exactly is moderation...halfway between what the law says and what you wish it would say?"

Of course there are things where moderation is appropriate. They are mostly where the effect of a policy are uncertain but worth trying. But there are others where "extremism" is clearly called for. Perhaps the devotees of moderation would like Lincoln to have freed half the slaves, or maybe he could have freed them from 12:00 until 5:00?

No..moderation is no virtue. I would prefer to let all the ideologues, right and left, fight it out. Let the differences be clearly understood...and the better ideas will survive. If people understand liberalism and its history, its boot heel might be removed from our country's neck and the proverbial stake will be driven through its heart.

For those of you who don't know much about Goldwater, he and Reagan are credited with founding modern conservatism. He was the Senator from Arizona and the Republican Presidential nominee in the 1964 election. Like Reagan and all influential Republicans he was labeled stupid, evil and extreme. Of course the Left never addressed his policies or philosophy. He moved to the right of the "Country Club Republicans," or the "Rockefeller Republicans," and their low tax anti communist platform. He extended this to include smaller government, individual responsibility, and constitutional mandates. In doing so the party developed a politically viable coalition by bringing rural Americans and evangelical Christians along with all people of faith into the Republican tent.

To get a sense of who he was, here is one more of his quotes. "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents "interests," I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can." pg 15. The Conscience of A Conservative (1960)

Lies

Lies come in many forms. Progressives justify most lies based on a misbegotten "greater good" theory- or the ends justify the means. Their techniques vary from repeating the lie so many times that people begin to believe it (A propaganda technique of Trotsky), or enlisting media types and supposed experts to confirm the lie (in logic this is referred to as a fallacious appeal to authority), their hope being that the lie will become "common knowledge" after some time period. Time would never allow anyone to deal with even a small percentage of these, but below I will list a few put out over the last couple of years that on their face are obviously false, yet achieved the status of a "given," "accepted science," or something "we all know."

Torture doesn't work. Remember the debate about water boarding. Whether or not it is torture may be debatable, but the lefts suggestion that torture doesn't work is preposterous on its face. American soldiers are instructed if captured to give the enemy only their name rank and serial number. However, during Vietnam many were told in advance to give up information well beyond that because they would be tortured and talk then anyway. Stories came back about captured enemy soldiers riding in a helicopter where one was asked a question and when he refused to answer was summarily thrown out of the helicopter from a thousand feet in the air. The next was asked the same question. Guess what happened? I don't know if these stories are entirely true, but I do know that almost anyone will give up information to stop torture. Yet everyone on the left repeated this myth and acted as if we are idiots for laughing at them.

Al Qaeda uses Gitmo as a recruiting tool. Would Al Qaeda say anything different or act differently if the prisoners were housed in Marion Ill? Think about the absurdity here.

Obama failed to communicate enough on his health care bill. Really his problem was he communicated too much, even though he did abandon the truth when explaining the bill. His problem was if he communicated better or more (if he told the truth) it would have been rejected faster and more completely than it was (if that is possible). He explained it his fictional way ad naseum, he gave 27 speeches about it, and still it was roundly rejected. No... he spoke enough. His problem was he was the tenth medicine man to pass through town.

Global warming is settled science. I admit that one could be illiterate and still know the last two were lies, whereas understanding the silliness of this statement might require reading a newspaper...say about once a month. The various attempts to hide information, fudge results, and destroy climate data are well documented in the Climate-gate emails. NASA and other US government organizations have admitted to participating in fraud in climate analysis. A paper was cited at the climate conference in Copenhagen last month claiming the glaciers in the Himalayas will melt within the next 35 years. When the author of the paper on which the conclusion was based stated that the conclusion was nonsense and not his, and that it would take hundreds of years if it happened at all, we discovered that the presenter was willing to lie. But what came out later was more egregious. The head of the UN Committee on climate change knew the presentation was fraudulent two months before it was presented, yet remained silent before during and after the presentation. Why are so many lies told if it is "settled science?" Could it be because if it is scrutinized in the same way any other scientific theory is, it becomes apparent it is baseless nonsense?

Gay Marriage is Not a Right

Ted Olsen, a great man and a great conservative, has teamed up with the liberal attorney Davis Bois to argue in the California State Supreme Court against Proposition 8 in which the people of California banned gay marriage. This week he wrote in Newsweek magazine an article defending his position. You can find it at http://www.newsweek.com/id/229957 I believe he misses at least one fundamental and game changing point, and here is why.

Dear Mr. Olsen,

As a a lifelong conservative, I take exception to the case you make for gay marriage in as much you fail to address the most conservative of all objections, that being support for the rule of law.

The arguments you present are quite moving, although you might want to trash that "settled science" bit as to the nature/nurture debate about homosexuality. I am not suggesting you are wrong, only that there is nothing at all settled on the issue. But I digress. The problem is that the proper forum for your most thoughtful and compassionate arguments is a legislative body, not a court of law. Were your arguments presented to the people's representatives, I for one might support them. But you seem to have chosen the liberal elitist approach. They know it is easier to win an unelected judge's support than a majority of the voters or their representatives.

For 200 years federal, state and local legislatures have passed laws giving privileges and responsibilities to married couples. In every case the "couple" was defined as a union between a man and a woman. This limitation may be unfair. It may be undesirable. But it is legal, and claiming that it is illegal based on an imaginary extension of a basic constitutional right is a gross misreading and misuse of the constitution. And, if it is not a constitutional violation, it is no business of the courts.

As a conservative I can support the right of people to do as they please so long as it doesn't affect others, but to enjoy privileges simply because another group has them, is offensive to me and many others. Do I have a constitutional right to park in a handicapped spot under some bizarre extension of the equal protection clause? Was the court right when it presented an incoherent argument in order to create the "right" to an abortion. As repulsive as legislatures often are, they are a lot better than unelected or unaccountable judges ruling on constitutional issues from which there is little recourse. That authority should only be used in the clearest and most egregious of violations. Certainly allowing some judge to make these public policy decisions is to undermine the greatest document in support of freedom ever written.

The length of your argument betrays its' failings. If the case you are making truly does relate to constitutional issues, you would have been able to make it in short order, much like the constitution itself.

I trust you will rethink this. Your sense of right and wrong and your compassion should not only include gays, but should extend to the very system which insures that our basic rights are inviolate. Your approach will create an uneven, chaotic application of the law, having the practical effect of denying us the freedom and the protection the law affords us when it is evenly applied.

I haven't written in a while, but am prepared to return. Meantime, this is one of the most thoughtful and well written articles I have seen in a long time. It is from http://www.americanthinker.com/ which is a GREAT site. There is hope, but it is a long, long road back.

October 04, 2009

Do Not Blame Barack

By Selwyn Duke

Contrary to what my title indicates, I probably judge Barack Obama more harshly than most reading this page. I don't think he is just a misguided ideologue or merely a creature of expediency. I believe, practically speaking, he is an evil man. That is to say, while he is largely ignorant like so many others, he has developed an affinity for evil. He mistakes it for good.

Yet, to be blunt, Obama doesn't alarm me as much as the average American. To explain why, I'll present something Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero said 2000 years ago when lamenting Julius Caesar's rise to dictator:

Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions . . . . Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful good society' which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.' Julius was always an ambitious villain, but he is only one man.

Barack Obama is only one man. A bad man, yes, but he is a symptom more than a cause. Without millions of fawning Americans, he would just be a community agitator, vainly preaching Alinsky principles from a soapbox. Of course, he is a symptom that exacerbates the underlying problem, and symptomatic treatment -- to ease immediate pain and hardship -- is certainly in order. But it is only the worst of physicians who focuses only on symptoms while ignoring the cancer eating away at the patient's midst.

Some of us lament the presence of self-professed communists such as Van Jones -- and other assorted intellectual mutants, such as Cass Sunstein and John Holdren -- in government, and how we elected a man who broke bread with self-professed communists such as Bill Ayers. But why complain now? We've had self-professed communists such as Bill Ayers -- and other assorted intellectual mutants, such as Ward Churchill, Cass Sunstein and John Holdren -- in academia for many decades. And good Americans still donated money to universities and still sent their most precious possessions, their children, to them. So, should it be any surprise that millions of these children would, knowing nothing and feeling all the wrongs things, flock to the polls and cast votes for people just like their teachers and professors? You may say that their parents knew nothing of these universities' true nature. But it was their place to find out. And Obama did not create the modern academy. He is more a creation of it.

We also criticize Obama for saying "We no longer are [just] a Christian nation" and while speaking in Turkey that "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation." But can we really say he's wrong? Has Christmas not become completely commercialized? How many of us say grace with our families before meals? How many of us pray every day? How many Americans subscribe to the modern perversion of the "separation of church and state" idea? How many of us say "God Bless" upon parting? Have the majority of American "Christians" not descended into moral relativism? It is here that some will call me a religious nut. All right, but I simply note that a Christian nation would actually practice Christianity and that if we are satisfied to be only nominally Christian, it lends weight to the argument that we're not actually Christian. Of course, we certainly can condemn Obama for attending a pseudo-Christian church and being part of the problem, but he didn't create our secular age. He is more a creation of it.

One thing Obama certainly did help create is the tea-party phenomenon. It is the largest, most impressive grassroots movement I can remember and I truly hope it grows beyond what even the most zealous reader would prefer. Yet, when I hear the protesters complain about the violation of the Constitution, I have to wonder we they've been. Did they miss the activist 1947 "separation of church and state ruling"? Have they learned about FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society? Don't they realize that the federal government long ago exceeded its constitutional bounds? Where is the constitutional mandate for Uncle Scam to involve itself in and/or fund housing, food stamps, farm subsidies, Medicaid, global-warming research, mass transit, and school sports programs? The fact is that most things the federal government has its claws into are none of its affair. Thus, to only now complain about constitutional trespasses is like having finally noted the invasion of Poland when the Nazis started bombing Great Britain.

We also have to ask how serious most Americans really are about respecting the Constitution. Here's a little test for them: Are you willing to give up your Social Security in the name of constitutional adherence?

I thought so.

The average American has his version of acceptable constitutional violation, Ruth Bader-Ginsburg has hers, and Obama has his. And Obama didn't create the "living document" mentality. He is more a creation of it.

Then there is our putrid popular culture. Effete Hollywood types -- such as the Obama sycophants in this bizarre Harpo Productions video -- thuggish rappers, MTV stoner types and the rest of our decadence czars helped galvanize the youth and propel the empty vessel to victory. Yet, while entertainment is a bastion of the left, it's not entirely a creation of it. The reality is that we, the people, empowered them. We watched their movies; laughed at their salacious jokes; were titillated by their prurience; and tolerated their mainstreaming obscenity, homosexuality and gratuitous violence. We allowed our children to dress in their ghetto styles and imbibe pure and utter filth. Like with so many other things, we helped create our entertainment -- a major symptom of spiritual malaise -- and then it helped induce many secondary symptoms. And one of them is Obama.

Of course, nothing is more associated with that symptom than the Shill Media, but I think you know what's coming. Who bought the mainstream papers for all those decades, watched the nightly news and bought all the lies? "How could people know?" you ask? Well, some certainly knew -- and some of those knew better than others.

Like Cicero, I'm sure I sound quite condemnatory, but I'm not here to lay a curse or consign anyone to Hell. I don't want to be found guilty of the George Bernard Shaw mistake G.K. Chesterton criticized most colorfully when he wrote:

It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots.

In reality, for us to have avoided that ever-repeated pattern of civilizational decline, the common man would have to be a very uncommon man, something, in the least, like a sublime moral philosopher. And, certainly, no person will have, metaphorically speaking, a hundred industrious hands, a hundred all-seeing eyes or even come close to enjoying demigod-like mental clarity. Yet a nation doesn't have to resign itself to being blind and crippled, either. We can usually manage one more hand and eye.

Truth be known, when we elected Obama, the nation said "Look, ma, no hands!" with its eyes closed. It required corrupted judgment to be blind to what Obama was. Note that "corrupted" is different than "corrupt." When saying a computer file is corrupted, there is no implication that it's evil; rather, it simply means it no longer functions as it should.

This partially explains why facts often don't matter today. Just as correct input may not yield correct output if fed into a malfunctioning computer, all the necessary facts may not yield a correct conclusion when processed by a corrupted mind. And anyone with a properly functioning virtue file would have sensed the lack of same in Obama. After all, there were so many indications, from his radical associations to his tolerance for infanticide (that's what you call a clue) to the fact that he once allowed his then two-year-old daughter to listen to rap to his empty sloganeering. Yes, we could've . . . known.

Yet my point here is not about the average person, who isn't reading substantive commentary anyway. It's that even most of us who oppose Obama and are political are just political, content to fight the battle with one hand and one eye. So many of us -- this includes readers and commentators -- are satisfied with boilerplate; it's Alinsky this and Alinsky that, San Fran Nan, Afghanistan and the Taliban, this bill and that political shill. This isn't to say there's not a place for such things, as many do need a course in politics 101. But if we want to have any chance of winning the war, we must move on to graduate work and fight it on the deepest levels, the spiritual and cultural. We must scrutinize ourselves and evaluate how we have been complicit in empowering the culture that spawns Barack Obamas. We must remember that those of us who are engaged are a minority weighed against an apathetic majority. A few stones however, can be substantial enough to tip the scales against a million pebbles. But this can only happen if we so greatly increase the weight of our virtue that it outweighs the vice that is everywhere.

I once heard a man of the cloth put it perfectly, saying "Everyone is in a different stage of conversion." Every thought we contemplate, word we utter and action we take move us closer to or further away from perfection. And it's always time for another hand and another eye.

Some Health Care Data

The income tax was passed in 1913. There were two rates, one percent and 7 percent. The politicians said that the tax would never go above 10 percent. In 1917, four years later, the top rate was 77 percent. Throughout American history broken political promises have been the norm. Obama denies that he intends to nationalize the entire health care system. He keeps saying that you can keep your private insurance if you like it. Of course he told the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) a while back that a plan of this sort is the first step towards a single payer system, and during the campaign he said that in 10 or more years out he hoped the government option would lead to single payer. Barney Frank admitted that if the Democrats passed health care with a public option it would lead to a single payer plan. So much for keeping your private insurance.

Also this week Larry Sommers repeated the fiction that economic recovery is dependent on health care reform. For anyone who believes him I have some oceanfront property in Arizona to sell. The new taxes required or the debt incurred would put tremendous pressure on the economy and do serious damage. There is nothing new with any of this. However, what is new is my discovery of some Heritage Foundation work that gives several interesting facts about the British national health care system and what we can look forward to if the health care bill passes.

Obama supporters like to point out that life expectancy in the US is below (slightly) 6 or 7 western nations that have national health care. They are factually correct, but the conclusion that this indicates that national health care programs are better than ours could not be more wrong. Life span is determined by many more things than the quality of health care. In fact overall health care is a relatively small item among those things determining lifespan. Diet, genetic predisposition, infant mortality etc. all are more important. For example if the statistics are normalized for murder (use a single murder rate in the calculation of all countries, rather that the differing ones where the US rate is sky high), the US lifespan moves much higher on the list. Do you think that the fish and rice dietary staples in Japan add to life expectancy when compared to a Quarter-Pounder and cheese fries or whatever it is that the 35 percent of our population who are obese are in the habit of eating?

But more enlightening is an examination of the life span of people who reach the age of 65. Certainly with this group the quality of health care becomes a far more important factor when determining longevity. Americans over 65 suffering from cancer, heart disease and most leading causes of death live longer, and overall Americans live far longer than the elderly from any other country in the world. Not surprisingly, America also has the shortest waiting time for treatment of any nation. Our system is far better than any other system anywhere, and it shows in the numbers.

When Medicare was passed in the 60s, congress projected the cost for several decades into the future. In 1990 the real costs had reached 20 times original projections. Estimates for the future are now up to a cool 100 times what the original projected numbers were. Admittedly it is difficult to project a year into the future, much less 50 years. Misses of this magnitude are not uncommon, and particularly when the government is involved. Yet everyone throws around numbers about what health care will cost 10 years from now as it they were predicting tomorrows sunrise. The fact is no one knows what an untested government run program will cost, but if history is any guide, it will be exponentially higher than the supporters say now.

Obama and the libs like to point to the rapid price increases of private insurance and claim it is out of control. In the last 7 years that rate has slowed from 15 percent to 7 percent annually. Maybe they are right, but in the government run program, Medicare, costs have increased 35 percent faster than private insurance. Also, during this period private insurance has progressively absorbed more and more of Medicare costs, thereby inflating its true cost and reducing Medicare's. Estimates range from 20 to 28 percent of Medicare costs are absorbed by private payers. No matter how you view the sustainability of the price increases, Medicare has increased dramatically faster. The question is why a government takeover of private insurance would be any different?

Another major administration fiction is that insuring the uninsured will save money. Wait a minute. How do we take 47,000,000 people (their number) onto the health care roles and save money. Do you buy it?

How many Americans are really uninsured anyway? In an earlier blog I pointed out that of the 47 million figure, 10 million are illegal immigrants, 10 million can afford health insurance (earn over $75,000 per year) but choose not to buy it, and 10 million already qualify for government health insurance but are too dysfunctional to get it. That leaves about 17 million. The CBO says that the house plan will knock 83 million people off the insured roles, and only 68 million will get back on, creating 15 million newly uninsured.

Uninsured does not mean untreated. No one in America is denied health care. By law the uninsured can not be denied treatment at any hospital emergency room. This is certainly not an ideal delivery system, but politics prevents many of the changes needed for improvments from becoming law.

All of the normal distortions resulting from central planning and political control (think nationalized health care) that occur in every government program, are happening in all of the countries with a national system. In Great Britain with a population of 55 million, 800,000 people are waiting for treatment. This is occurring while almost 20 percent of the hospital beds go unoccupied. It reminds me of the old Soviet Union. The people were starving while millions of tons of food rotted in the fields because the distribution system had failed, and there was no mechanism to make the needed adjustments.

Great Britain does have plenty of ambulances, and citizens can use them for such things as going to the doctor (not emergency), or going to the pharmacy. Of course these ambulances don't have a fraction of the life saving equipment that is standard in the US. What they do provide is votes from the people who use them like taxicabs for the politicians providing them. The young think the system is great. Why? Because they rarely use it. The people who understand the systemic failures are the ones who do use it, the elderly and the sick.

In Britain rationing occurs primarily in the areas with the smallest constituency because cuts and shortages are damaging politically. Renal failure is a relatively small group of people in Great Britain. Therefore there is a shortage of dialysis equipment. Who gets to use it and who doesn't is left up to the hospitals, leaving the impression the shortage is their fault. On average dialysis is denied in 25 percent of the cases for people over 55, 40 percent for people over 65, and 100 percent for people over 75. Renal failure over a certain age means death. Can you imagine the outcry if such rationing occurred here? And don't think this is an isolated example. Severe rationing (at least by our standards) occurs throughout the system.

Of course there are still many rules/ limits handed down from above. In Great Britain there is a dollar amount ($20,000 in 1990- I am sure it is higher now) which is the most hospitals are allowed to spend to extend a life 6 months. If someones dollar allotment runs out too soon, so does his life. The Obama plans know this problem will occur with us too if the bill passes, so what they did was budget a generous amount of money for end of life counseling. Now that is what Mom and Dad need; some bureaucrat helping them decide if they want an assisted suicide. On the other hand, it will save money.

I could go on but this whole debate is a joke. What we have is far from perfect. Still, it is the best the world has ever known. We could make vast improvements with a relatively small changes, but politics make those changes difficult, and are unlikely to occur soon. Therefore I beg the sane politicians..please.. first do no harm. Defeat this idiocy.

Take Two Aspirin And Call Me When Your Cancer is Stage 4

Ann is reviled by the left as well as some moderate types whose entire exposure to her is out of context quotes. In Washington the most dangerous (and hateful) thing one can do is tell the truth. This is a typical column of hers; truthful, clear, succinct, and funny. I tried to make many of the same points, but she does it so so much better.


Take Two Aspirin And Call Me When Your Cancer is Stage 4
by Ann Coulter
07/22/2009

All the problems with the American health care system come from government intervention, so naturally the Democrats' idea for fixing it is more government intervention. This is like trying to sober up by having another drink.

The reason seeing a doctor is already more like going to the DMV, and less like going to the Apple "Genius Bar," is that the government decided health care was too important to be left to the free market. Yes -- the same free market that has produced such a cornucopia of inexpensive goods and services that, today, even poor people have cell phones and flat-screen TVs.

As a result, it's easier to get your computer fixed than your health. Thanks, government!

We already have near-universal health coverage in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' hospitals, emergency rooms and tax-deductible employer-provided health care -- all government creations.

So now, everyone expects doctors to be free. People who pay $200 for a haircut are indignant if it costs more than a $20 co-pay to see a doctor.

The government also "helped" us by mandating that insurance companies cover all sorts of medical services, both ordinary -- which you ought to pay for yourself -- and exotic, such as shrinks, in vitro fertilization and child-development assessments -- which no normal person would voluntarily pay to insure against.This would be like requiring all car insurance to cover the cost of gasoline, oil and tire changes -- as well as professional car detailing, iPod docks, and leather seats and those neon chaser lights I have all along the underbody of my chopped, lowrider '57 Chevy.

But politicians are more interested in pleasing lobbyists for acupuncturists, midwives and marriage counselors than they are in pleasing recent college graduates who only want to insure against the possibility that they'll be hit by a truck. So politicians at both the state and federal level keep passing boatloads of insurance mandates requiring that all insurance plans cover a raft of non-emergency conditions that are expensive to treat -- but whose practitioners have high-priced lobbyists.

As a result, a young, healthy person has a choice of buying artificially expensive health insurance that, by law, covers a smorgasbord of medical services of no interest to him ... or going uninsured. People who aren't planning on giving birth to a slew of children with restless leg syndrome in the near future forgo insurance -- and then politicians tell us we have a national emergency because some people don't have health insurance.

The whole idea of insurance is to insure against catastrophes: You buy insurance in case your house burns down -- not so you can force other people in your plan to pay for your maid. You buy car insurance in case you're in a major accident, not so everyone in the plan shares the cost of gas.

Just as people use vastly different amounts of gasoline, they also use vastly different amounts of medical care -- especially when an appointment with a highly trained physician costs less than a manicure.

Insurance plans that force everyone in the plan to pay for everyone else's Viagra and anti-anxiety pills are already completely unfair to people who rarely go to the doctor. It's like being forced to share gas bills with a long-haul trucker or a restaurant bill with Michael Moore. On the other hand, it's a great deal for any lonely hypochondriacs in the plan.

Now the Democrats want to force us all into one gigantic national health insurance plan that will cover every real and mythical ailment that has a powerful lobby. But if you have a rare medical condition without a lobbying arm, you'll be out of luck.

Even two decades after the collapse of liberals' beloved Soviet Union, they can't grasp that it's easier and cheaper to obtain any service provided by capitalism than any service provided under socialism.

You don't have to conjure up fantastic visions of how health care would be delivered in this country if we bought it ourselves. Just go to a grocery store or get a manicure. Or think back to when you bought your last muffler, personal trainer, computer and every other product and service available in inexpensive abundance in this capitalist paradise.

Third-party payer schemes are always a disaster -- less service for twice the price! If you want good service at a good price, be sure to be the one holding the credit card. Under "universal health care," no one but government bureaucrats will be allowed to hold the credit card.

Isn't food important? Why not "universal food coverage"? If politicians and employers had guaranteed us "free" food 50 years ago, today Democrats would be wailing about the "food crisis" in America, and you'd be on the phone with your food care provider arguing about whether or not a Reuben sandwich with fries was covered under your plan.

Instead of making health care more like the DMV, how about we make it more like grocery stores? Give the poor and tough cases health stamps and let the rest of us buy health care -- and health insurance -- on the free market.