There is no moral equivalence between the Republicans and the Democrats of 2009-2010. Anyone standing in the middle chanting ‘a pox on both of their houses’ does not understand the nature of the debate. The middle of the roader retards the polis.
On fiscal issues there is a clear divide. As to whether America is generally good, not in need in of radical transformation, not in need of making amends to the [morally superior] World Community, there is a clear divide. On issues of federalism and the role of the federal government there is a clear divide. Perhaps an exception can be made when it comes to social issues: some Democrats are pro-life (so I’m told) and some Republicans support gay marriage, for instance. Yet, it can also be said that insofar as Republicans prefer a federal government of narrow scope and limited regulatory power while Democrats prefer sweeping federal regulation, many of our social issues become issues of federalism. Fundamentally, is gay marriage a state issue or a federal one? It is time to pick.
I have always considered myself a non-partisan ideologue. There is a timeless truth underpinning my refusal to pick up the flag for one particular political club: members change frequently, and so too do the platforms.
But in the last two years, the clubs have polarized enough for me to temporarily change my position. One party supports policies that are necessary components of a totalitarian government. To this end, while I may not be calling myself a Republican, the enemy of my enemy has at least become my ally. Every Republican voted against Obamacare and the 2009 Stimulus.
Surely, the vast majority of Democrats do not support a totalitarian government. Of course, Vladimir Lenin had a name for these folks. Unwitting Socialist appeasers can preach about civil liberties and privacy all they want. Socialist appeasers they remain, and I must support their opponents.
I can no longer tolerate moral equivalence arguments. The parties are not the same, the people in them are not the same, and the ideas are not all just as bad.
Nor is it true that both sides are equally guilty of harmful rhetoric.
Last summer, Sarah Palin said Barack Obama’s health care bill would be creating ‘death panels’ to ration and restrict care for seniors and the disabled. There is no “Death Panel,” so to speak, contained in the new health plan. There is rationing. Rationing indeed forms the foundation of Obamacare: we cut benefits, we rein in costs, and, at the same time, we expand subsidies to cover, heretofore, unsubsidized people. Still, Palin’s statement is branded “fear mongering.”
For decades, Democrats have accused the other side of fear mongering. (Lest we forget the racist, fear mongering Democrat and former President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign in which Johnson unambiguously insinuated that Barry Goldwater would instigate a Nuclear War). It was always Republicans who were going to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits for seniors.
(Republicans were also going to take away a woman’s right to chose by letting state citizens vote on abortion issues, and keeping the federal government out of the discussion (and the financing). Republicans are racists because they reject social engineering programs like Affirmative Action, race quotas, and amnesty for 12 million Mexican refugees. They are racists for not supporting political correctness, hate speech and hate crimes laws: liberal speak for censorship. Republicans are mean and heartless because of their opposition to unsustainable, often unconstitutional, social entitlements that often encroach on the rights of states and always seize mass amounts of money from taxpayers—programs that are slowly bankrupting the republic. Heartless, racist, bigoted, misogynistic, nationalistic, isolationist, hateful . . . .)
Well, after decades of—dare I say—fear mongering about cutting Medicare, Democrats decided to do just that themselves. Five hundred billion dollars shall be cut from Medicare as an Independent Medicare Advisory Committee is installed to determine which drugs and treatments are cost-effective for seniors. Seniors are the most expensive patients in our health care industry. Over the last year, we have become accustomed to Democratic talking points about old people gobbling up health resources in their last years. What about young people? Did Obama’s grandma really need that hip replacement, Mr. Compassionate wondered?
I know that Democrats have sat up many a night for many painstaking hours considering why this might be. It offends their Jacobin sense of égalité that some citizens might be using more of something than other citizens. If I may clarify: old people are old, young people are young. This may stand to reason why old people shall consume more health care resources than young people. There is nothing inherently inequitable with most of our health care dollars being spent on seniors in their last years.
“But this cannot stand. If older Americans are going to be so costly, it is high time this nation redistributed those resources to young people. But don’t worry about that rightwing fear mongering, its not like we’re going to “ration” in the process of “redistributing.” That’s crazy. You’re crazy!”
What Palin meant by ‘death panels’ is obvious: federal agencies shall be established to ration health care. And, so they shall. Billions are being cut, and more than 2 million Medicare patients are loosing their prescription drug plans.
More to the point, Canada, England, New Zealand, Australia and most of Europe ought to be cautionary tales. All of these nations are rationing care. Seniors, the sick and the poor are always the most disadvantaged when health services are rationed: you don’t need to worry about taking resources from the young, healthy and wealthy.
But when listening to Democrats and media spin doctors—or even the middle of the roaders—I hear endless moral equivalence. For a moment, I was just about to start complaining about how Democrats are never called fear mongers. Then I realized that this is because Republicans are not as stupid as Democrats (at least not in the aggregate). In all seriousness, “fear mongering” is their term, and they can keep the idiotic rubbish.
For, does anyone really think people vehemently object to things because they like fear? What exactly would be the point of fear mongering for the sake of mongering fear? What does Palin have to gain by convincing people that Obamacare will ration health care? Either she truly believes it will or she does not. If she does, this is not fear mongering (even if she is wrong). If she does not, then why is she claiming it will?
Is it just to slander Obama, so she can run for president against him in 2012? Some will say this is naive, but that’s really just too absurd to entertain.
If Sarah Palin agreed with Obamacare, she would simply be a Socialist. It is fine if you are a Socialist, but I am fairly certain Palin is not a Socialist. Moreover, her point about rationing is manifestly true given that this bill, (1) cuts $500 billion from Medicare patients, (2) extends new subsidies to tens of millions of new beneficiaries, and (3) purports to rein in overall costs.
If she had said something crazy with no basis in truth or reality, like, “orange dragons will descend upon the earth firing hot dogs from their eyes, as a direct causal result of Obamacare,” perhaps this would constitute fear mongering. Rather, her statements carry a grain (mill) of truth. Moreover, she herself is on the record as being philosophically opposed to Obama’s approach to fixing health care.
Given these considerations, why spread fear for its own sake? If she agreed with the bill, she could easily become a Socialist, switch parties and support the bill. She does not. Thus, liberals can either live in a fantasy world where their opponents simply have no serious reason for their opposition; or they can acknowledge that, while they may disagree with the reasons of their opponents, the reasons do, nonetheless, exist.
For example: Republicans are not Socialists; Republicans do not like Socialism; therefore, Republicans do not like Socialist federal health care plans. In conclusion, Republicans honestly and actually do not think Obamacare is a super-awesome hopily-changey-change idea. When they were opposing it, it was because they actually disagreed. Thus, when they make statements that happen to inspire fear, it is because they themselves are actually afraid.
Perhaps Palin was ginning up support for a possible run in 2012, but that does not mean her statement was disingenuous. Fear mongering—just trying to scare people for political gain—suggests cynical political posturing.
Certainly, I do not call all Democrats fear mongers. But is there any question that they frequently use fear to gin up opposition to Republicans?
For years now, Democrats have been preaching that the world is going to melt unless we pass cap in trade, spend hundreds of billions financing indefinable “green-sector” jobs, stop extracting the energy resources from the 3.7 million highly-endowed square miles the U.S. is sitting on top of, submit to the regulatory oversight of the Environmental Protection Agency and send more than $100 billion to the United Nations to curtail Global Climate Change. Unless we do this, the ice caps will melt and the sky shall fall. Evidence? “Er, eh—we’re working on it . . . .”
Just in the last year (to say nothing of the last seven decades), Democrats constantly stressed that 45 million people do not have insurance (until Congressman Joe Wilson sounded the alarm that Obamacare purported to subsidize illegal immigrants. Suddenly, then, Obama cut the illegals out of that number and went with a more modest 32 million).
Of course, the Census reports tell us that this number is bunk (see two blogs ago for more analysis). Indeed, most of the uninsured are not people without access to insurance. Insurance is tied to employment: when you are out of work, you are uninsured. America has and never will be at 0% unemployment. (“Full unemployment,” what economists call the inevitable number representing only those who are cyclically unemployed, is thought to be somewhere between 3 and 6%. Even in the best possible economy, there will be a certain number of unemployed people at any given point).
Also, most of the uninsured are young people, and/or people making more than $50,000 per year (half of those are making more than $80,000). In a word, rational economic agents have made the choice that health care costs more than they are willing to pay, given their good health. But does this stop Democrats from being vague? Is it not more politically advantageous to create the image that America is a banana republic?
Notice also, that while Palin’s hyperbole is based on truth (Obamacare will ration), the statement that 32 or 45 million are insured is intentionally misleading. Yes, there are 45 million in America without insurance, but what has that got to do with a health care overhaul if most of them are, (a) not citizens and/or (b) simply choosing not buy insurance? Wouldn’t it have been more honest to fight for the 10 million or so citizens who truly do not have access?
Also, 18,000 die each year as a result of a lack of insurance, according to Democratic talking points. Obama, Hillary and would-be HHS Secretary Tom Daschle have all repeated this ad museum. Before my head explodes as I confront the necessary and copious illogic applied in reaching this statement, let me explain.
Democrats rely on a series of separate, unconnected—indeed, inconclusive—studies which were done to test clinical outcomes of persons on Medicaid. One of these studies actually showed that the women in the control group who had Medicaid were statistically more prone to die of breast cancer than women without any insurance. If we accepted the results of this study, we would say that women without insurance are better off than women with Medicaid.
Of course, even had I not read about these reports, the statement is ludicrous on its face. The sheer number of variables that might affect the efficacy of such a determination—that 18,000 die as a result of a lack of insurance—is mind-boggling. If a homeless drug addict dies on the street, is it because he lacked health insurance? Huh? Possibly. Oh, you know what, it could have been all the drugs too, come to think of it. If a seven hundred pound man dies of a heart attack, it might be that but for his lack of insurance he would have lived. Or, in the alternative, it might be that but for his love of jelly donuts he might have lived, also.
Again, I’m not saying this was all for the sake of creating fear—morons like Tom Daschle surely believe that 18,000 people are dying each year as a result of having no health insurance. I believe in his sincerity.
Yet, there are actual examples of naked fear and smear tactics perpetrated by elected Democrats. Last summer, Pelosi called town hall protesters ‘Brown Shirts’ and went on rambling about the Harvey Milk assassination from thirty years ago, making an unveiled and bizarre association between Obamacare protestors and the wholly unrelated assassination of a gay icon from the 1970s (Milk was assassinated by San Francisco City Supervisor, Dan White: a crazed DEMOCRAT). She also spent a week howling about swastikas being brandished by the protestors. To my knowledge, there was at least one protestor who did this. The Hasty Generalization is the logical fallacy in which one leaps to condemn an entire group based on the actions of a single member or set of members. Luckily for Democrats, the leftwing anti-war protestors who show up at the funerals of soldiers almost never brandish swastikas.
Congressman Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) said on the House floor that Republicans were aiding and abetting a “holocaust” by stalling Obamacare—again, relying on misleading and inaccurate numbers about thousands dying as a result of having no health insurance. In fact, just what was the truthful claim, ala Sarah Palin ‘death panels,’ upon which this hyperbolic pissing-fit was grounded?
Democratic lawmakers have spent the last week shedding crocodile tears and feigning martyrdom for their courageous vote. Congressman Barney Frank (D-mASS), alleges he was called homosexual slurs leaving the Capitol. Black Congressmen claim they were called racial slurs. Video footage does not exist of any of these incidents. It wouldn’t matter if they were verified. Angry Americans protesting a health care bill they spent more than a year vocally opposing deserve better than to be generalized on the basis of isolated incidents.
In fact, the Democratic Party has stood idly by during decades of angry protest and vitriolic speech. This last year, liberal college students were engaging in violent protests, damaging public and private property. Actual violence. Not the threat of tea party protestors scarily exercising their Second Amendment right by buying a gun. Not theoretical violence based on a piece of hate-mail.
Everyone in public life receives regular threats and hate mail. Both political parties have nut cases. Only one is run by them.