The New Clarion

Justin Ruben of MoveOn.org says this:

August was a real wake-up call for progressives when health care reform was endangered by an angry mob organized by an alliance of insurance companies, oil companies and right-wing fear-mongers.

He’s continuing the leftist strategy of characterizing citizens concerned about big government taking over health care as an angry mob controlled by dark forces with ignoble motives. Those people who showed up at town halls represent over half of America.

Does he believe it? Probably. It follows from their premise that Americans are corrupted by capitalist greed. That same idea is behind Obama’s statements about doctors being corrupted by greed so that they would perform unnecessary amputations or tonsilectomies to make money (and therefore we need the impartial philosopher-kings of the state to control medicine for the doctors’ own good).

Whether leftists believe it or not, they will repeat statements such as the above quote until it becomes conventional wisdom. Their beliefs and their premises will continue to be at odds with reality. And leftists never, ever think twice about their “narrative”; when they do, they become neocons.

With the tide steadily turning against Obamacare, I am reminded of why electing Obama was certainly risky for this country… but may yet work out far better for American than would have a McCain presidency.

Yes, the policies Obama wants to pass are likely worse than what McCain would have done (though certainly not the gaping differences that many conservatives would have us believe). The tradeoff involved with the risk of such policies being passed, however, is that even if you grant that McCain’s less socialistic version of health-care reform (for example) would have done less damage in the short term than Obama’s, McCain’s would likely have passed.

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Mark Steyn focuses on a telling statement President Obama made at the UN:

“I have been in office for just nine months — though some days it seems a lot longer. I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me. Rather, they are rooted, I believe, in a discontent with a status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences … .”

Forget the first part: That’s just his usual narcissistic “But enough about me, let’s talk about what the world thinks of me” shtick. But the second is dangerous in its cowardly evasiveness: For better or worse, we are defined by our differences — and, if Barack Obama doesn’t understand this when he’s at the podium addressing a room filled with representatives of Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Venezuela and other unlovely polities, the TV audience certainly did when Col. Gadhafi took to the podium immediately afterward.

(Isn’t all of reality defined by differences? A is not B because it is different.)

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I see Obama is still insisting on his original Obama care legislation instead of some watered down compromise. I think this is a last ditch effort to put a socialized medicine over on the American people. My response to that is a few more lyrics added to a recent post which I repost in part below. (more…)

Back in July, I pointed out a certain mainstream view of the U.S. Constitution, in particular the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, as an example of that epistemological primitivism we all know and love as pragmatism.  In that post, I linked an article that outlines the legal argument that conservative pragmatists use to defang the Ninth Amendment (the author of that article, Clayton Jones, shows up in the comments, and puts on a clinic in pragmatist “thinking”).

Against that backdrop, now observe how a Leftist builds upon the mainstreaming of the defanged view of the Ninth and Tenth Amendment in coining a new epithet: “tenthers”, which is a classic smear of the principled view as being on a level with 9/11 “truthers” :

More important, there is something fundamentally authoritarian about the tenther constitution. Social Security, Medicare, and health-care reform are all wildly popular, yet the tenther constitution would shackle our democracy and forbid Congress from enacting the same policies that the American people elected them to advance. After years of raging against mythical judges who “legislate from the bench,” tenther conservatives now demand a constitution that will not let anyone legislate at all.

The author, Ian Millhiser, is telling us, with a straight face, that a clause which restricts State authority, is “fundamentally authoritarian“.  Earth to Millhiser: “shackling our democracy” was literally the precise and exact point of the entire Constitution.  Millhiser has just told us that the Founders were authoritarians.

This, I submit, is obviously insane, and conservatives will simply dismiss it as the usual Leftist insanity.  But they evade the real point here in doing so.

What IS the point, is that Millhiser is in fact correct in describing the principled view of the Tenth Amendment as “fringe”.   This Orwellian insanity is mainstream — the “American Prospect” is hardly fringe, and neither is The New Republic, who echoes their dismissal of the principled view as “mad ravings” (!)

What sets the stage for Millhiser’s bold-faced contradiction?  What — or who — is responsible for the “fringe” status of the so-called “tenther” (principled) view?

You get one guess.  Without this marginalization of the principled view by pragmatists, it would be Millhiser and his insanity which would be on the fringe.

The left-right synergy of the insanestream marches on.

Right Wing News, Daily Pundit, and other eminentoes of the conservative blogosphere have criticized Charles Johnson (or dropped him from their blogrolls), whose Little Green Footballs blog used to be as important as any. Johnson has taken more and more to attacking the religious right and such conservative stars as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck. He also wages a campaign against the Tea Party movement because some of the protesters are racists, gun nuts, birthers and religious fundamentalists who believe Barack Obama is the Antichrist.

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As if providing health care for all Americans weren’t enough of a violation of our rights, we are also providing flu shots for 20 million foreigners.  The government shouldn’t be in the business of providing flu shots for us, let alone foreigners.  According to the article, the U.S. ordered 195 million doses of the vaccine, and will donate 10% of those to other countries “that do not have the resources to procure it on their own.”  If that isn’t clear enough, this makes it more transparent:

Worldwide production of the vaccine is projected to be more than 2 billion doses, but experts had feared that most of those doses would go to the rich countries, which could afford to pay for them.

The U. S. has upwards of 300 million citizens.  So, in addition to violating our rights by stealing the money to buy these vaccine doses, the government is also planning to reduce an already insufficient supply for our population, and give it to others.  For an action is more altruistic, the less we benefit from it, and the more we suffer. 

Actually, it is not clear to me whether the 195 million doses the U.S. government ordered is the entire U.S. supply.  Are there private supplies in the U.S. also?  Or is that as much as the manufacturers can make with full-out production?  And of course, another problem the government is creating is a shrinking supply of drug makers, by over regulating (there should be none), and demonizing them at every opportunity.

By now, everyone’s heard of the takedown of ACORN by two undercover conservative activists, enough to spur the Senate to vote 83-7 to defund them.

Among those seven votes supporting ACORN was junior New York senator Kirsten Gillebrand:

“While Senator Gillibrand finds the actions of certain ACORN employees to be reprehensible and will ask ACORN leaders for a full investigation and plan to prevent any further abuse, the truth remains that thousands of New York families who are facing foreclosure depend on charitable organizations like ACORN for assistance.”

As always, altruism is the great whitewash, the ultimate shield for evil of any size.  “But they help people!” is the whine of ACORN’s apologists everywhere.  This isn’t new.

The real story here is the wider pattern of which ACORN is merely a small part: how altruism deters and disarms our culture’s moral immune system.

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Glenn Beck has decided that the main issue the opposition to big government should focus on is corruption.

All the special interest handouts in the stimulus, health care, and cap-and-trade bills aren’t there to build a better nation. They are there to build the framework of these corrupt “organizations” like ACORN and SEIU to fundamentally transform America.

And if we allow these bills to go through, an already enormous problem will spread like a disease.

We need to kill the corruption before we do anything else.

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When I see this massive crowd, I hope Janeane Garofalo continues to describe them as “unmitigated douchebaggery.” I hope Harry Reid calls them “evil mongers.” And I hope Obama gets even angrier.

Why do I hope these things? Because in the history of mankind no one was ever persuaded by insults. No politician ever won a vote by demeaning voters. And Obama’s anger is a sign of weakness.

Something big is happening in America — and it is the truest grassroots movement I have seen. Who is leading the Tea Party movement against big government? What charismatic leader does it have? There is no leader; there are only individuals motivated by the idea of liberty. An idea can be a powerful thing — especially when all the opposition has is insults.

Many people, at least among those over 35, have noticed that the Obama: ”Progress”, ‘Hope’ & ‘Change’ posters, by ‘street artist’ Shepard Fairey, strongly resemble the artwork of communist revolutionary propaganda. Democrat-types dismiss the observation, saying there is no connection, that the Obama art is just more of Fairey’s usual work.

Are they that superficial, or are they just lying? The resemblance is no accident of graphic options, or of RGB-‘Posterizing’ in Photoshop. It derives directly from the artistic and philosophical leanings Fairey has adopted.

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Let’s imagine that Barack Obama were given a truth serum before tonight’s speech on health care. I know, a politician saying only the truth is a fantasy that stretches “the willful suspension of disbelief” more than unicorns or hobbits ever could. Imagine some alternate universe in which it could happen.

This is my vision of what an honest Obama would say. Click on Read more to enjoy this fantasy.

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I’ve only watched a few minutes here and there of Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News, but I have heard that he was the target of a boycott by the left. It turns out on Friday his ratings beat Bill O’Reilly. It seems this is the first time the 5pm EST slot has bested the 8pm EST slot. Nice work giving him publicity, boycotters! He couldn’t have done it without you.

I’m surprised to hear that the boycott was led by the White House. And who specifically leaned on advertisers to drop Beck like he was hot? Van Jones — the communist who recently joined the millions of unemployed workers in America.

So the Czar of “Green Jobs” spent his time on an Alinskyite campaign attacking Obama’s media enemies. That figures, since “Green Jobs” is a fantasy.

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With two children in public-school Kindergarten, I was very concerned about Tuesday’s speech by President Obama to all public school students from pre-Kindergarten to sixth grade. It wasn’t so much that I thought my two girls would become Obamatons—my concern was more along the lines of the precedent being established.

Any speech suitable for delivery to such a wide range of ages is likely to be little more than rah-rah cheerleading about staying in school. [UPDATE: That is exactly what it turned out to be.] But this sort of thing always starts out innocuously; next thing you know kids are writing out pledges to Obama that they’ll stay in school and there’s a weekly address to them. The whole thing reeks of the “cult of personality” that has encircled Obama since he announced his candidacy. I guarantee that he would not exercise subsequent restraint, it’s just not in his nature.

But the left rightly points out that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush made such a speech once each and there wasn’t a groundswell of opposition. Leaving aside the fact that most parents of school-age children now were school-age children themselves back then (a salient point that they conveniently ignore), they see only one possible explanation for the current backlash: the president’s race.

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Once more, a comment of mine takes on a life of its own and demands its own post.  This one is in response to a comment left by Greg Paulhus, one of the remaining Canadians who have yet to be disillusioned by the ongoing collapse of their socialized medical system.

In it, Paulhus attempts to claim that the stories of misery in Canada are emanating primarily from Alberta and Ontario, where there are smidgeons of private health care being permitted for the moment — so therefore, those little smidgeons of private health care must be the root of the problems there!

While Mr. Paulhus catches up on his basic logic skills, the rest of us can dig into the facts he’s evading.

But first, let us give him some credit: by trying to tell us that Ontario and Alberta don’t count anymore, he nonethless admits thereby that things really aren’t all candy-stripers and balloons in the Great White North.  Instead of telling us how nice the system is in Canada, now it’s all about how great things are in Saskatchewan!

As I am familiar with this playing field, this moving of the goalposts by Paulhus will avail him no good.  The facts on the ground must be pretty bad in Alberta and Ontario for the Canadian socialists to be chewing their own legs off in the trap like that.  Of course, what Paulhus fails to note for our non-Canadian audience is that Ontario and Alberta together contain half or so of the population.  Those are big legs.

The stories like this that I know of through personal connections and direct experience all predate the advent of that smidgeon of private medicine that is currently permitted in Ontario.  This privatization was undoubtedly prompted by the Chaoulli case in Quebec that I noted earlier; that case is only binding in Quebec at present, and yet Ontario and Alberta have since found it necessary to permit that smidgeon to order to alleviate the ongoing slow collapse (and likely Chaoulli-inspired legal consequences) of the system. This failure has been long in coming, and was thoroughly manifest long before the privatization; the latter is obviously  a *response* to the crisis, not its cause.

(I’d be interested in knowing more about what is going on in Quebec, where Chaoulli has legal force. That Paulhus fails to mention it makes it a good bet that Quebec also breaks his narrative to some extent.)

But wait, there’s more! (with apologies to Billy Mays, RIP): the “transfer payment” subsidy.

These payments are part of an interprovincial welfare program, which the federal government uses to redistribute tax wealth from the “have” provinces to the “have-not” ones. You can bet that Alberta (oil) and Ontario (manufacturing base) are “have” provinces… while Saskatchewan, the birthplace of Canadian socialism, has long been a “have-not”.

The extent to which things are medically “better” in Saskatchewan is the extent to which their system is subsidized — by Alberta and Ontario. Paulhus and his ilk are no better than those Easterners in the early ’80′s who crowed about the National Energy Program and the low gas prices it brought about… while carefully failing to look too deeply into what that cheap gas was costing Albertans.

UPDATE: well, I’d almost have lost that bet; Saskatchewan has been a relatively small net recipient of transfer payments of late, and won’t even qualify for any in 2009-2010.  Ontario and Alberta, however, remain the net losers in this deal.

Below is a lighthearted parody that cracked me up:

Tom Bowden posts a passage from Atlas Shrugged that I had forgotten about. As Mr. Bowden sets it up, “one of the characters recalls what happened after his company medical plan started allocating medical care on the basis of collective need:”

“In the old days, we used to celebrate if somebody had a baby, we used to chip in and help him out with the hospital bills, if he happened to be hard-pressed for the moment. Now, if a baby was born, we didn’t speak to the parents for weeks. Babies, to us, had become what locusts were to farmers. In the old days, we used to help a man if he had a bad illness in the family. Now—well, I’ll tell you about just one case. It was the mother of a man who had been with us for fifteen years. She was a kindly old lady, cheerful and wise, she knew us all by our first names and we all liked her—we used to like her. One day, she slipped on the cellar stairs and fell and broke her hip. We knew what that meant at her age. The staff doctor said that she’d have to be sent to a hospital in town, for expensive treatments that would take a long time. The old lady died the night before she was to leave for town. They never established the cause of death. No, I don’t know whether she was murdered. Nobody said that. Nobody would talk about it at all. All I know is that I—and that’s what I can’t forget!—I, too, had caught myself wishing that she would die. This—may God forgive us!—was the brotherhood, the security, the abundance that the plan was supposed to achieve for us!”

This is why people are buying a 52-year old novel more now than ever before (a publishing phenomenon). The novel reads like — well, I was going to write that it reads like today’s newspaper, but newspapers have given up reporting anything that makes the Democrats look bad. Let’s say it reads like the more interesting stuff on the internet.