The Anchoress
Okay, I’ve decided that Nancy Pelosi (whose Native American name might be “Stands With An Angry Little Fist” ala “Dancing With Wolves”) is beginning to sound like a paranoid lunatic who can find a convenient villain any time she needs one, as Tom Elia points out here.
“They are the villains in this,” Pelosi said of private insurers. “They have been part of the problem in a major way. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening. And the public has to know that. They can disguise their arguments any way they want, but the fact is that they don’t want the competition.”
Well, and why should they, considering Barney Frank -in an unscripted moment- has admitted that the public option will mean a government take-over of health care. And that will be true, even if the “public plan” starts to be called “the co-ops” instead.
But I digress. More Pelosi:
“… It’s almost immoral what they are doing,” added Pelosi, who stood outside her office long after her press conference ended to continue speaking to reporters, even as aides tried in vain to usher her inside. “Of course they’ve been immoral all along in how they have treated the people that they insure with pre-existing conditions, you know, the litany of it all.”
“They’ve been immoral all along.” Gosh, it wasn’t so long ago we were being told that people in power had no business dictating morality to the rest of us. How quickly things change. By the way, please note, Pelosi doesn’t mind keeping campaign donations made by these immoral companies.
You know what might REALLY be immoral? Putting the health care of the nation in the hands of people who can’t manage a car buy-back program for ten days without going broke.
The Obama administration is telling lawmakers that its much-touted “cash-for-clunkers” program is already running out of money, according to three Senate aides familiar with the discussions. . .in the one week since it took effect, it appears to have run dry of the $1 billion allocated to it, aides said Thursday.
In simple English:
“Note that the program started on July 1, they only published the actual rules Friday and they’re still working out how to get the dealers their money. . .what’s essentially happening here is that car dealerships are giving $4,500 interest-free, unguaranteed loans to the federal government… and the determination of whether or not those loans get paid off is more or less going to be at the discretion of mid-level bureaucrats at the NHTSA.”
MMMhhmmmm, that’s just the sort of incompetent, inefficient nightmare bureaucracy I want managing my health care! The billion-dollar program is already broke, even though the dealers haven’t been paid. And the White House is considering asking for “more money”?
Let’s take another look at that handy budget chart, and pity these poor dealers who are just trying to stay in business and keep people employed and have no idea when they’ll ever see a dime of their $4,500 advances paid back.
Please note: Pelosi is not the only one running around pointing the finger and shrieking “villain!” The Democrats are scolding their obedient-monkey-press. Bad, bad mediamonkies!
Senate Democratic leaders on Thursday blamed Capitol Hill media for setting an August deadline for health reform and Republicans for blocking the bill’s progress. . . . [Sen Harry] Reid said reporters created a fictitious deadline of a successful vote by the August recess, and downplayed the fact that the chamber won’t meet that mark.
“That is a deadline that you created,” Reid told a group of about 75 reporters. “It’s not like we don’t have a product. Significant progress has been made …
The White House, meanwhile, is pointing at poor Jake Tapper -one of the few newsmen willing to do more than drool in the presence of Obama- and crying “villain, damned scaring villain” for bringing up the possible unintended consequences of government-run health care. Never mind that the White House has used the rhetoric of panic, emergency, crisis and dire-circumstances for pretty much every new policy they’ve rammed on us for the past seven months.
Ah, well, we’re told that America likes the political theater of healing, and maybe cynics are cynics because they’ve been proven right so often.
After all, Senator Dianne Feinstein can have some annoyingly determined senior citizens arrested without much notice.
Senator Barbara Boxer can haughtily tell a Brigadier General to “call me Senator”, like an insecure kid playing dress-up, and then she can advise an accomplished African American businessman and veteran that another African American “would be proud,” to be testifying at her tea party, and still be called “senator.”
President Obama can spend years denouncing his predecessor for pushing legislation through without adequate review and then do a much more dramatic job of it, himself, with nary a raised eyebrow from the press.
President Obama can also win an election by saying noble stuff like this:
“The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United States.” — Sen. Barack Obama, March 31, 2008
…and then spend his first 6 months in office maintaining every one of Bush’s extensions of executive power while bringing over 30 Czars (with more on the way) who are unaccountable-to-Congress (or to you and me) into his inner circle -one of whom is quite a creepy ghoul– and there is no carrying on about the immorality of it all, not in the press and -to their shame- not by many of the loyal opposition, either.
The president and his Secretary of State can put the weight of America behind their support of a power-grabbing socialist despot, over the constitution of a sovereign nation like Honduras, very few people are asking about it.
And the President’s Right-Hand Man? Aw, he’s got a doctor-brother, named Ezekiel, who is also an Obama adviser and Ezekiel says:
“communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. . . medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ’96).
Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.
He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years” (Lancet, Jan. 31).
Remember when the people who thought such things were, like, nazis, and stuff? Big inhale here: I love the smell of re-worked morality in the morning papers!
But that does raise a really good question, though: Who is going to tell ill-but-beloved celebrities that they should go ahead and die, before anyone notices that some patients are more valuable than others in this “carefully crafted piece of legislation” – one that the legislators can’t even be bothered to read before they cast their “ayes”.
Oh, morality. Redefined, just like the ethics of the most ethical congress, evah.
Oh, villains, everywhere you look.
Oh, poor, paranoid Pelosi, just trying to protect us from the villains, the damned smiling villains! Frankly, I don’t think we need her help finding villains.
Quick question: Can Congress declare a mutiny? If so, could someone please impinge on some of Pelosi’s protective strawberry-scented air and expose her, once and for all?
UPDATE: Look! More Villains, damned filthy profiteer capitalist villains, wondering if their “friends in the White House” can’t help them out with a little price fixing.
Related:
Catholic Key: 1 Paraplegic Equals Half a Human…
Jimmie Bise: What if Obamacare is like Cash-for-clunkers?
Obamacare; we’ve only just begun
Obama’s selective memory
Stephen Carter: When Did Profits Become Evil?
Victor Davis Hanson: Our Angry Aristocracy
Dissent: No longer the “highest form of patriotism”, it’s now “unAmerican.”
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