All Wee-Weed Up

“And then last year just about this time, you’ll recall that the Republicans had just nominated their Vice Presidential candidate, and everybody was — the media was obsessed with it, and cable was 24 hours a day, and “Obama’s lost his mojo.”  (Laughter.)  You remember all that?  (Laughter.)  There’s something about August going into September — (laughter) — where everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up.  (Laughter.)  I don’t know what it is.  (Laughter.)  But that’s what happens. ”

- Remarks by President Barack Obama at DNC Headquarters, 20 August 2009, at the ”Organizing for America” National Health Care Forum

I don’t know what it is, either, Mr. President; the term “all wee-weed up” is foreign to me.  It must have been funny enough to make your stormtroopers laugh, though.  Thank goodness Robert Gibbs was there to clear it up for me:

“August of 2008, everybody was nervous about whether the entire presidential campaign was slipping out from underneath the hands of the president, who they previously didn’t think would actually be the nominee.  So this is just — this is sort of an August pundit pattern between people getting overly nervous for something that still has a long way to go.  Bed-wetting is — would be probably the more consumer-friendly term.”

So the Obama Administration is deeming the American people who question a trending tack further to the left, now plainly revealed through policy proposals, as bed-wetters?  Clever, and somewhat effective I guess, since, as I see it, the President’s electoral base is not concerned with public policy more so than they care about his “coolness” factor.  The White House doesn’t have to work too hard to maintain this uninformed electorate.  This same Press Secretary went so far to submit that his boss would be “quite comfortable” with being a one-term president if that meant he could pass this health reform bill.

It’s in the middle, though, where things get interesting.  In the sweeping change election of 2008, it’s the centrists who elected Obama to office, 53% to 46%.  These very centrists are now being abandoned, and painted as an “angry mob” of “bed-wetters” by the regime in power.

I said earlier on this site that 75 percent of voters are satisfied with their health insurance.  Sorry; I was wrong.  According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 83 percent are satisfied with the quality of their health care and 81 percent are similarly satisfied with their health insurance.  So why would we toss everything we have overboard to enact a new program projected to cost over a trillion dollars in ten years; a program inherently unsustainable; a program designed to burden businesses; a program that would quell the free movement of capital in our battered economy; a program that will pass the bill downward to the next generation?  Bed-wetters, unite!

Hey, kid!  Pick up my tab!

The world’s richest man, Warren Buffett, who supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election, tends to agree that now is not the time for an entitlement that seizes 16 percent of the nation’s economy.  He stated in an Opinion Editorial in the New York Times as much, saying:

“The United States economy is now out of the emergency room and appears to be on a slow path to recovery.  But enormous dosages of monetary medicine continue to be administered and, before long, we will need to deal with their side effects.  For now, most of those effects are invisible and could indeed remain latent for a long time.  Still, their threat may be as ominous as that posed by the financial crisis itself.

“To understand this threat, we need to look at where we stand historically.  If we leave aside the war-impacted years of 1942 to 1946, the largest annual deficit the United States has incurred since 1920 was 6 percent of gross domestic product. This fiscal year, though, the deficit will rise to about 13 percent of G.D.P., more than twice the non-wartime record.  In dollars, that equates to a staggering $1.8 trillion.  Fiscally, we are in uncharted territory.”

How could we sensibly enact a program that could quite possibly be the nail in our nation’s proverbial coffin?  At this critical moment in history, Buffett goes on to point out, our public debt (the net debt) “will increase more than one percentage point per month, climbing to about 56 percent of G.D.P. from 41 percent.”  A peculiar moral prerogative surfaces:  While trying to love our neighbor as ourselves, we would deny our children the same opportunity of success we have experienced.  Is there any moral obligation at stake?  It is on moral grounds, for instance, that this Administration is couching its newest petition for health care reform; our president today said so much in his radio address:

“This is our chance to march forward.  I cannot promise you that the reforms we seek will be perfect or make a difference overnight.  But I can promise you this: if we pass health insurance reform, we will look back many years from now and say, this was the moment we summoned what’s best in each of us to make life better for all of us.  This was the moment we built a health care system worthy of the nation and the people we love.  This was the moment we earned our place alongside the greatest generations.  And that is what our generation of Americans is called to do right now.”

Now that’s just precious.  This appealing argument, however, relies on pathos while rejecting the logos of deductive reasoning.  Centrists, such as the influential Warren Buffett, see the subsequent folly of burdening future generations with a reform package that, while aesthetically pleasing, is unsustainable. There is nothing “moral” about that.

While we’re on moral high ground, it’s worth noting another petition the President is making for health care.  Last week, at a meeting with Jewish rabbis, Obama submitted, “We are God’s partners in matters of life and death” quoting from the Rosh Hashanah prayer that says that in the holiday period, it is decided “who shall live and who shall die.”  Inasmuch lies the President’s moral justification for rationing, a cost-cutting method he denies would occur.

What is the goal here?

Through the Europeanization of our health care system, we would eventually have to ration care.  This is not just an opinion; it occurs in every state-run health care system on the face of the earth.  These systems are able to do so with the backing of the law; therefore, in the context of a life-liberty continuum, life itself is threatened as the fundamental freedom of choice in health care is stripped away by a state-run governing body.  The state, now God’s partner in life and death, can make decisions based on whatever criteria they want:  in Britain, the National Health Service denies coverage to smokers with heart disease and denies knee and hip replacements for obese patients, due to “lifestyle choices,” thusly spake by British Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt.

With a European health care system, America will fall victim to yet another entitlement that aims to improve the lives of its people through the sacrifice of their individual liberties.  Author Charles Murray describes the draining effect the extended Nanny State has on a society in his book, In Our Hands: “Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor.  When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant.  Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.”

For the preservation of their individual freedoms, people fled Europe centuries ago for the New World, journeying Westward, establishing this nation on these precepts; now, the struggle continues, but the current potential for tyrannical rule comes from within.  I believe it is the goal of the far left for the United States to assume a European economy, which punishes ingenuity with high taxes and emasculates its people with entitlements.  I have seen no other evidence to convince me otherwise.

A collapse of our current system would be perpetuated by the proposed health care reform; note that the debate over Obamacare is not occurring between Republicans and Democrats, but within the scope of the Democratic Party itself.  A path to socialism involving this schism neatly defined in the “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” an article that has garnered much attention in recent days.  In 1966, two leftist sociologists published their idea in The Nation as a “Strategy to End Poverty.”  Cloward and Piven proposed maximizing enrollment in welfare systems, create an unsustainable political crisis in order to collapse the foundation of our economy:  “The ultimate objective of this strategy is to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income… via the outright redistribution of income.”  Community organizers have been working towards this eventual end for years, and a larger entitlement system (with a state takeover of the health care sector) would certainly make their jobs a lot easier.

The Administration has a problem, though:  America largesse has turned off to the public health insurance option.  The President’s leftist base, though is demanding it.  Painted in a proverbial corner, Obama’s considering all options.  As I pointed out in my last two posts, he has two options to regain support from the center; take the reins and provide a bill that America agrees on, or veto the bill when it hits his desk.

But is that feasible?  Would he shoot for the center?  Last week, by way rhetoric from him and his Health and Human Service Secretary, it appeared he was going to pare down the bill and eliminate the public option.  Leftists such as Howard Dean, Paul Krugman, and Bob Herbert all cried foul, so the option was placed back on the so-called table.  With friends like these, Mr. President, you might as well be a Republican.

Since my last two posts, though, something new has emerged:  in the bloated budget Obama signed into law in May, a provision called “reconciliation” was approved which states the Senate needs only 51 votes to pass any budgetary items, instead of the 60 votes to overcome any ensuing filibuster, which the U.S. Constitution denotes as necessary.  This parliamentary move, which would consist of splitting the bill into two separate votes, is being referred to as the “nuclear option” for passing health care reform.  A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that while Democrats are pursuing a bipartisan bill, “Patience is not unlimited, and we are determined to get something done this year by any legislative means necessary.”

Recognition of what’s at stake now has the public all wee-weed up.  Are you wee-weed up?  I’m wee-weed up!  People are wee-weed up because they care about their families, their country, and their way of life.  Thomas Paine once said, “It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from his government.”  That’s never been truer than now.  The urge to protect one’s self from an unsolicited authority and, consequently, fight totalitarianism to the death is intrinsically American.  No one should be surprised, then, when town hall meetings disintegrate into chaos.

At this moment, more Americans disapprove with the President’s path to health care reform than do approve.  According to Gibbs, it appears that’s not much of a concern as they are “quite comfortable” losing re-election and are equipped with a Congress willing to use “any legislative means necessary” to push a European domestic policy upon the American people. Perhaps Congress and the Administration need to be afraid of more than simply losing re-election.