Politics as Pathology

It’s becoming clearer that Obama’s controversial healthcare program is less about health care than about expanding government (read: Democrat) control over the citizenry. Even on its face the plan is disingenuous - to put it politely. Obama’s assertion that greater coverage will be accompanied by lowered cost just doesn’t add up. Two aspects of the plan that prove the point are its lack of significant tort reform and (despite official denials) its deviously opaque inclusion of illegal aliens in the coverage.

First consider tort reform. This from Charles Krauthammer :

When a neurosurgeon pays $200,000 a year for malpractice insurance before he even turns on the light in his office or hires his first nurse, who do you think pays? Patients, in higher doctor fees to cover the insurance.

And:

Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health-care  news conference. Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers.

So political payback to the trial lawyer voting bloc trumps meaningful cost reduction in health care. Even Germany and other Euro’s have caps on payments to legitimately aggrieved patients which eliminates outrageously excessive jury awards and tends to limit the lawyer-enriching frivilous lawsuits that are notorious in America.

Then there’s the matter of coverage for illegal aliens which has been disingenuously denied by Obama. Read (quoting Rep. Michele Bachmann (R- MN) that

The real issue is, will illegal aliens have access to taxpayer-subsidized health care? Well, the answer is yes, they will. In the bill, 3200 has a section that says illegal aliens will not have access to health care, and that’s why President Obama is able to say that. But the practical effect is that illegal aliens will have access to health care because there is no provision for enforcement in the bill. In other words, someone could walk into a Health and Human Services office and say, ‘I’d like to have free health care for me and my family.’ And the Health and Human Services office wouldn’t have any ability to ask, ‘Are you a legal citizen of the United States?’ They would have no ability to ask, ‘Could you show me your documentation to prove that you’re a United States citizen?’ Without that law of enforcement, the practical effect is that illegal aliens will have health care.

There's absolutely no question that illegals will get full health care under Obama's bill. In any case it won’t matter because these illegals will later be "amnestied in" to full citizenship by the Democrats who now own the country.

What's going on is the creation of an imported "proletariat" that will provide the Democrats with millions of new voters and perpetual political power. This is all by design and started under Clinton/Gore with their "Citizenship USA" program. This was a hurry-up offense which even waived background checks on aliens to expedite them to citizenship so they could be registered as Democrats in time to vote in the then-upcoming election.

Under Soros/Obama we are witnessing the culmination of a slow-motion socialist revolution which started in America at Columbia University (ca 1938) by a Marxist group known informally as The Frankfurt School. Passage of Obamacare will officially plant the Socialist flag of America on top of the White House. Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the [capitalist] institutions” is near completion.

Back in the Barry Goldwater era the Liberal punditry of the day collectively recoiled in horror at the possibility that Goldwater might become America’s President. It was Pat Brown, then Democrat governor of California, who somehow detected “the stench of Fascism in the air” when Goldwater received the 1964 Republican nomination for president. Then, as now, the term Fascism described Benito Mussolini’s militant socialist dictatorship reviled as it was for its repressive totalitarianism. The fact that the conservative Republican Goldwater differed from Mussolini in personality and political philosophy as day differs from night never fazed liberal demagogues of the day. But then, liberals have never let facts or the truth intrude on their fantasies. One such fantasy is the demi-god status which they have christened Barack Obama and blessed his increasingly militant Presidency. Obama as savior. But reality continues to smuge his image.

Consider recent news of four SEIU union thugs physically assaulting a bystander outside an Obama-initiated town hall meeting called to consider the needless rush to ram through Obama's dubious health care reform bill:

Two union members yell racial slurs at a black man and then punch him in the face, and so far neither President Obama, nor Rep. Carnahan or the SEIU has condemned the union thugs for ‘acting stupidly.’

Such assaults are redolent of the tough-guy “action squads” or squadristi employed by Mussolini’s fascisti to harass and intimidate political opponents. Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) regime used the notorious SA (sturmarbtreilung) “Brownshirts” in the same way and for the same reasons.

Yes, there is a real “stench of Fascism in the air” but it goes ignored by the Obama Left which would have otherwise gone ballistic by now had the same events unfolded under a Republican administration. Another instance of the notorious "double standard” hypocrisy and deviousness of the, dishonest, the-ends-justify-the-means revolutionary left.

Tags: Fascism, Obama, SEIU thugs, Kenneth Gladney, left wing violence

Pity poor Congressman John Conyers (D, MI) who is apparently in over his head as a member of the House of Representatives. Conyers is overwhelmed by the prospect of having to read and understand the pending health care legislation before signing off on it. From the Heritage Foundation blog:

At the National Press Club this week, Congressman Conyers said: “I love these members that get up and say, ‘read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages, and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

Whether it’s John Conyers or Alfred E. Neuman wouldn’t much matter it seems. As Congressmen they will retain their existing cushy, expansive, taxpayer-subsidized health care. Only the rest of us will need lawyers to find out what a ball-of-snakes health care program Conyers et. al. will have ignorantly foisted upon us.

Another individual freedom to be sacrificed on the suffocating altar of coercive Collectivism.

Tags: Conyers, Health Care, Coercion, Socialized Medicine

General Motors under UAW domination directed by inept Government bureaucracy is the perfect metaphor for Mussolini-style Fascism. A mini-dictatorship of the proletariat.  More coming in the Trojan Horses of contrived "crises" (e.g.; Global Warming; Cap & Trade Enviromentalism; Health Care Reform) "demanding" more government by fiat (e.g.;1000-page Congressional "porkulus" bills voted into law without being read by anyone but affecting everyone). Who was it that said "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste"? (Rahm Emanual. Obama's Chief of Staff). We have a Fascist revolution by Crisis Management. Socialism is everybody equally miserable. Fascism is socialism with whips.

Recent polling shows Obama’s Presidency steadily losing favor with the electorate. Not surprising considering rising unemployment, among other negatives, sobering-up some of the formerly enraptured Obama voters. Obama is either blundering badly or is in the midst of a deliberate process of growing ever bigger government. The eager complicity of the Democrat Congress in support of Obama suggests the latter.

We already have an inflation latent, un-stimulating stimulus program with another on the drawing boards. Massive expenditures of taxpayer dollars by government have gone into costly bailouts with more on the way:

Congress continues to churn out even more popular new scripts: bailouts for for dying auto companies, regulating carbon based on crackpot climate change theories, and now nationalizing health care. Viewers can hardly wait for the California Goes Bankrupt and the Here Comes Inflation Again episodes.

These events all represent extraordinary intrusions of government into the manipulation and control of both the public and private sectors. This all smells like so-called Third Way “progressivism” which is the term given to a conveniently ill-defined mix of socialism and capitalism with emphasis on the former.

In fact, “Third Way” is simply a delicately deodorized pseudonym for Fascism coined to avoid otherwise historically odious connotations.

Fascism itself came about under Benito Mussolini in Italy ca 1925. Mussolini, an ardent socialist, [1] understood that socialism alone could not sustain itself economically and so devised a blend of a minimal, highly regulated, militantly unionized industry, obedient to a socialist command economy. This mix no doubt looked good on paper but ultimately failed in practice. It failed for the same reason that you can’t breed a lamb and a tiger: they’re two different animals. Competitive, pragmatic, efficiency-driven capitalism doesn’t work when run by theory-obsessed, intuitive, abstract-minded, socialists.

But the Left, unfazed by history and beguiled by the prospect of union voter enabled, perpetual political power, presses on. A preview of where we’re headed nationally may be seen in the financial disaster that is now California. The Democrat dominated legislature of that state has long-since sold out to the teacher’s; state-employee; and other unions in return for their unflagging support at the ballot box. The state is now cannibalizing itself as its productive, tax-raped citizenry flees to saner pastures.

Ultimately, California will be “bailed out” by the Federal government but there will be no one to bail out the country as a whole when it inevitably crashes and burns. Fascism redux.

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[1] Goldberg, Jonah, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, Doubleday, N.Y., 2007, 25-52

Tags: Third Way, Fascism, Obama, Cap and Trade, Stimulus