They Took Health Care Reform Out Back and Shot It in the Head

I made the comment yesterday that following the miraculous and historic election of Scott Brown (R-MA - just had to type that to see what it felt like!), they (meaning the Democrats) took 'health care' reform out back and shot it in the head.

Basically, with the restoration of the Republican minority's ability to filibuster any attempt to pass an obnoxious 'health care' reform package, the impetus for all Democrats to fall in line and support the bill disappeared. Those few Democrats that were not happy with the bills being debated, for whatever reason, now no longer feel compelled to respond to the arm twisting from the Democratic leadership. Thus, you are now seeing enough Democrats backing away from these bills that there is no longer enough votes to pass them. Just like in 1993-94, the 'health care' reform process is dying the slow death of progressive overreach, as well as the fact that the hyper-liberals can never gain enough support for a bill that is communistic enough to suit them. Couldn't be happening to a nicer piece of legislation.

I think we must all continue to listen for the footsteps of the process coming back to life, zombie-like. But the chances are slim; the momentum has been reversed, and all the steam is leaking out of the engine that was driving it forward. The Republic is saved, at least for now.

Referring back to my call for brinkmanship, I am a little concerned that this 'victory', such as it is, might result in defusing the anger at the overreach and overspending of the Democrats. This is something we simply must not allow to happen. Even though this process may have been stopped for now, we must go on as if it has not. The only difference is that where before we had the threat of imminent socialism, we now have only the spectre of the threat. Don't think for a moment that if the progressives are not beaten back now, that they will not very quickly be back for another attempt to try again.

It is helpful that that Democrats cannot help but give us new ammunition to replace that we just lost. The Democrats are now debating a bill to increase the federal debt ceiling by another $1.9 trillion dollars to a staggering total of $14.3 trillion.

The Democrats complained that George W. Bush ran up massive deficits. As you can see here, Bush raised the debt by $1.885 trillion in his first term and another $3.014 trillion in his second, for a total of $4.889 trillion in his 8 years as President. President Obama has increased the debt by $1.573 trillion in his first 365 days as President; when combined with the $1.9 trillion increase now under debate, he will have reached $3.473 trillion in under 13 months.

That's 71% of Bush's increase in essentially just his first year!! And no substantial improvement in economic performance or unemployment has come from it.

I'd call that some pretty powerful ammunition, wouldn't you?

The Fundamental Flaw of ObamaCare in a Nutshell

Ken Blackwell made a startlingly succinct appraisal of the current plans by the Obama Administration to 'reform' the medical care system in a post on RedState today. I think the reason that so many people in this country are opposing this plan is really on the basis of this particular aspect of it -- they feel in their hearts and souls what is wrong with it without being able to put it into words. Ken Blackwell has found the words.

In a post discussing the special election for the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts left open by the death of Ted Kennedy (I will not call it Kennedy's seat; that seat belongs to no one person)between Martha Coakley (D) and Scott Brown (R), Blackwell was discussing the statement made by Coakley that Roman Catholics should not work in certain jobs in health care because of their conscientious objections to certain procedures (read abortion):

Pittman specifically asked Coakley about the rights of conscience of health-care providers, and segued into a query on Roman Catholics in Massachusetts’s hospitals....

(Coakley's) response to Pittman was to denounce the idea of any allowance for individual conscience in federal healthcare legislation. Then she uttered the line that alone ought to sink her campaign: “The law says that people are allowed to have that. You can have religious freedom but you probably shouldn’t work in the emergency room.”

Blackwell responds by stating:

The logical consequences of Martha Coakley’s statement are both grotesque and stupid.

Martha Coakley does not exist in a vacuum. Her belief that conscience and its protections must be forced out of the healthcare sector are tightly bound up with the ideology underlying the President’s push for healthcare reform. That reform threatens ever-greater government involvement in healthcare, and probably portends its takeover if passed.

With that comes the precedence of government priorities — and there’s little room for individual conscience then..... President Obama is taking the first step toward forcing healthcare professionals to follow the government’s ethical agenda rather than their own.

And it won't just be 'health care' professionals' ethical positions that will be subjugated to that of the ruling party (as it will be the ruling party, not the "government" making these ethical decisions). The ethical positions of every individual patient must also bow down to the edicts of those who have placed themselves over us because they are convinced they know better how to run our lives than we ourselves do.

This is the ethical, nay the moral bankruptcy of the reform plans that are being rammed down our throats and of all of those who are doing the ramming and anyone else who does not stand up against this travesty.

Almost every action taken so far from Dear Leader has had at its core this issue, but in the 'health care' reform debate, it is openly, glaringly clear:

We are engaged in a fundamental battle between liberty and tyranny.

And in this war, there is no middle ground, no fence to sit on.

I know which side of this battle I am on. Which side do you choose?

A Time for Brinkmanship

The third chapter of Ecclesiastes begins:

1To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

To this I feel it is time to add "a time for brinkmanship.

Through discussions with various people, I have discovered that not many people really know this word, much less what it means. So, from Dictionary.com:

brink⋅man⋅ship 
–noun
the technique or practice of maneuvering a dangerous situation to the limits of tolerance or safety in order to secure the greatest advantage

I suspect that many of my loyal readers (especially my first and so far only Follower!) have been wondering where I have been lately, considering the intense debate that has been going on over the matter of 'health care reform'. Well, I have been away, tending to another project and doing my day job (you were aware that more people get sick in the winter?).

Besides, after my first round of fury at the AMA's insane endorsement of H.R. 3200 and the Senate's protracted debate over their much-different 'reform' bill, I realized that to expend a great deal of breath, energy and angst extolling the dangers of these bills while they were being bent and twisted and melted and metamorphosed into their final forms would not be terribly productive. It is the final bill, the merger of the House and Senate bills, which really matters and which should be the target of all of our criticisms. What this final bill will look like after it emerges from the ping-pong match between Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi (but not from anything as open as a Conference Committee, oh no, not for this 'transparent' administration) is anyone's guess; my guess is that it will be a blend of the worst parts of both earlier bills. And given how our august bodies of legislators have been behaving lately, we will have precious little time in which to criticize it, for I suspect this will be another one of those pieces of legislative legerdemain that simply must be voted on before the bill can actually be read (or even seen) by those voting on it, much less the rest of us.

I have, moreover, come to another realization over the past month or so. The legislation isn't really the problem. Now before you think I've gone completely mad (note to my readers: having gone postal long ago, I left 'completely mad' behind some time in the Cretaceous period), let me tell you that I have not changed my mind about what Dear Leader and his ilk are trying to do to our medical care system and the rest of the economy. But I have determined that the 'health care reform' legislation and the so-called stimulus bill and the 'cap-and-trade' carbon tax and all the rest are just the symptoms of the disease. And to fight only the symptoms of the disease is doomed to failure, just as much as if all you did for someone's pneumonia would be to give them Tylenol for their fever and neglect to give antibiotics to treat the real cause of the disease.

So if the legislation is just the fever, what is the disease? Socialism, communism, statism -- take your pick; they are all equally noxious. And continuing the pneumonia metaphor, we need to direct our criticism -- our antibiotics -- at the bacteria of all these noxious -isms, namely, the legislators and the supporters of the legislators who are pushing this socialist agenda. To put it most bluntly, our target is the Democratic Party.

So where does brinkmanship come into play? The Tea Party movement and the raucous townhall meetings of this past summer should give you an idea. These protests were caused by the rising anger of a large segment of the American people at what our elected representatives are trying to do to us instead of for us. This anger comes from an unconscious (but becoming increasingly more and more conscious) realization that the socialist movement is trying to subvert the fundamental principles upon which the American nation is founded. In other words, the people are beginning to see that the country they live in and love is being systematically dismantled and turned into a something else that they did not sign up for and decidedly do not want!

In order to stop this process, there has to be a clear majority of people willing to stand up and not just say but shout "No more! This stops now!" But the inertia of the masses is great and it will take a tremendous motivation to get them all up and shouting. That's where the idea of brinkmanship comes in -- maneuvering a dangerous situation to the limits of tolerance or safety in order to secure the greatest advantage. So the maneuvering that I propose is this:

Let the Democrats pass the 'health care reform' bill. Oh, we'll protest and complain, but let them pass it. (If they can marshall their votes, they'll be able to pass it regardless of our protests.) Let that bill be the most bloated, government-regulated, tax-laden, expensive bill they can imagine. Let it pay for abortion on demand, sex-change operations, and health care for illegal aliens. Let it be packed with truckloads of obnoxious pork to cater to whims of the elitist Senators and Representatives who, like Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, have to have their egos stroked in order to secure (read 'buy') their votes. Let it slash Medicare and Medicaid to the bone, establishing the need for rationing and the subsequent 'death panels' that such rationing will require. Let it pass with the minimal number of votes necessary in the House and the minimum number in the Senate. And let's make sure that every one of those votes is that of a Democrat.

And while they're at it, they (the Democrats) can go ahead and pass the multi-trillion dollar, industry-destroying, economy-collapsing 'cap-and-trade' carbon tax; a second government-make-work stimulus bill; and any other boondoggle program they can think of. (Anything and everything except Card Check.)

Let them pass all the bills they are debating, which are crafted to piss off the greatest number of people possible -- and particularly the senior citizens of this country, who are the single most reliable voting bloc in the electorate.

And let them do it all by the end of January. Or at least February.

What we do then is spend every waking moment after that until the November 2010 elections making sure that everyone knows and no one forgets just how much control of their own lives they have just lost, how much of their Constitutionally-enshrined freedoms have been forcibly taken from them, and how much they and their children and their children's children and their children's children's children's children's grandchildren will be paying for this unique privilege for the foreseeable forever. And of course, we must also make sure that everyone who is made furious by this knows just exactly who to blame for all of it, and what they can do about it.

My goal with this game of brinkmanship is not to stop a piece of legislation. It is not to just take back the House or the Senate or even both.

My goal is to break the back of socialism in this country for this century and even longer by breaking the Democratic Party. I want the backlash against the Democrats to be so huge and pervasive that the conservative and the moderate members of the party have to bail out of the party to try to save their political hides (though such will likely be a futile maneuver). I want the Democratic Party to become so unpopular that it will be left representing only the 15-20% lunatic leftist fringe in this country who have taken control of the current party and have set it on this path of destruction. I want the word 'Democrat' to properly assume the pejorative connotation that 'Communist' now enjoys (since they have become basically synonyms anyway). The rest of us, the majority, can then go ahead with fixing all the things that these Communist-Democrats have screwed up, starting with repealing all the legislation that was used to engender the flames of fury that were used to break the Democrats.

But don't think for a moment that the proper alternative to the Democrats are the Republicans. For most of the last 20 years or longer, the Republicans have been just as bad as the Democrats, only not quite so much. Just who will be the alternative I cannot at this time say, but I think we may be living in historic times in which we will see the birth of a new and long-lasting political party, something that has not happened in over 170 years.

I am not alone in thinking that the seeds of anger at the destruction of American liberty have been sewn, are growing, and have a chance at coming to fruition in order to save the system that our Founding Fathers created more than 22 decades ago. And the only way this will happen is if the anger that is building is not dissipated by something like the defeat of this or that bill, or the apparent rebirth of Republican 'conservatism'. It is going to take a lot to push the American people to finally go through with the oft-expressed plan to "throw all the bums out", but since that is what is required for the salvation of American liberty, and by extension, liberty throughout the world, the great risk of such political brinkmanship is necessary.

If you want to understand a little bit more about one (in my opinion, fairly astute) person's analysis of the Tea Party movement and what it is really all about, read "Obama’s Atomic Bomb:The Ideological Clarity of the Democratic Agenda" by John David Lewis at The Objective Standard. It's a long essay but well worth the read. For a detailed look at what the Founding Fathers created for us and what we are allowing the socialist-statists to cast asunder, read The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World. This book is not sub-sub-titled Principles of Freedom 101 for nothing. If you can read this book and not be absolutely furious (or even a little bit postal) about what is going on in Washington not just now but for most of the past 100 years, then you have no conception of what America is really all about.

Cross-posted at Redstate.com