Could anything be more embarrassing than the brouhaha kicked up over this health care bill? For starters, take a look at this debt clock:
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Bush's prescription drug benefit is set to cost the US 19 trillion dollars. Meanwhile, Social Security rates as a measly 14 trillion in comparison. In other words, Bush is a worse 'spender' than FDR, the most hated politician of the right. Moreover, Obama's health care bill is supposed to cost 800 billion. Let's assume the 'real' cost of Obama's health care is 10 times as high as projected, just to satisfy conservative naysayers. In that case, he would cost our country 8 trillion dollars over time. That's still almost half as much as Bush's prescription drug benefit. No matter how you slice Obama's health care bill, it is nothing compared to Bush's health care bill. Therefore whence cometh the hysterical reaction of the right wing to Obama, when no such protests were given under Bush? All sorts of right wing blogs are calling for secession which until now had found nothing wrong with this country. Even mainstream newspaper editorialists warn ominously about how Obama's spending policies are going to force a new civil war:
http://rightbias.com/news/kuhner42.aspx
Meanwhile 'Tea Partiers' march around by the hundreds of thousands complaining about -- what? The taxes they aren't going to pay, because taxes are only being raised on the hyper rich, who have better stuff to do than walk around carrying signs? Or perhaps the law requiring children can't be excluded from health insurance due to pre-existing conditions? I guess for all sadists everywhere, this was a huge blow. If it were simply about the cost of the measure, all these protests and editorials should have been written about Bush's prescription drug plan. Instead that plan was passed amidst deafening silence. No one protested, and whatever anemic response the right made to the cost was not accompanied by talk of secession or civil war or other hysterical 'end times' countermeasures.
I cannot help but think Republicans are simply evil people who wish to deprive the poor of health care so that they'll suffer and die. This makes lower-middle-class people, the typical republican base, feel better about themselves because they aren't suffering and dying like the poor. It's sort of like a spanked child going and kicking the family dog, the only thing lower than himself, to make him feel better. Sure we're just a bunch of peons making nothing in comparison to the rich, but so long as there's an even lower class, a class without any health care at all, suffering and dying beneath us, then life is comparatively swell. After ruling out all other explanations for why people feel so passionately about this issue, as opposed to any other, what other reason could there be?
This has nothing to do with the evil of 'redistribution.' After all, the Bush prescription drug bill was a blatant redistribution of money to the elderly. Unlike Social Security and Medicare, where the elderly have to pay into the system long before they receive the benefits, the prescription drug benefit was just a free handout with no corresponding tax increases to the rich. The inevitable payers will have to be the heavily indebted future generations, a clear redistribution from them to the elderly, who did nothing to merit this handout. If conservatives say the elderly deserve it because they are elderly and thus pitiable -- then that argument could be made a thousand times as strongly for the pitiable unemployed, uninsured, children, and poor of our nation, tens of thousands of whom die each year for lack of access to quality health care, long before their full lifespan has played out. So if it isn't anger at redistribution, and it isn't due to pity, what CAN be the reason for this double standard?
Bush also did bank bailouts, and stimulus measures. Nothing Obama did was any different from his predecessor. Furthermore, the recession started under Bush, and is ending under Obama, so who's the fool now? If people want to complain about Obama's handling of the economy, didn't they have a much better target in the previous president? Furthermore, if conservatives were really so worried about spending, why don't they cut funding to the military, the most enormous waste of money in the entire budget? Bush got us into two unnecessary wars that will end up costing us two trillion dollars over time. Conservatives want to start an even larger war with an even more powerful Iran, and never consider the cost as in any way important. We are told that this war would somehow improve our security, or at least help Israel. Suppose it did, fine. Also let's suppose war with Iran would end up costing 4 trillion dollars, an eminently fair estimate given Iran's population and geographic size is far beyond Iraq/Afghanistan. If those four trillion dollars were spent improving the quality of our roads, or giving Americans free health care, how many more lives would be saved over all? Why do conservatives only care about lives lost to terrorism and treat all other losses as unimportant?
Are jews simply so superhuman that preserving one of their lives is worth millions of the rest of us lowly cattle? We're told that we cannot afford to redistribute even one penny for the sake of sick children, but no price is too high to redistribute funds from our people to the security of a foreign nation.
Before anyone complains about this new health care bill, much less complains in the vehement and hysterical tones they have taken a liking to, I want to see them complain even more about every other expenditure that has cost more than the health care bill first. Only then could I take these pundits seriously. Their choice of targets says nothing about the target and everything about themselves.
That's not all though. Let's ignore the economic sphere for a moment. The economy isn't everything. The greater problem here is the choice of outrages to get outraged over. These protesters and pundits talking about a civil war were absolutely fine with making America into Brazil via mass immigration. They had no objections to 30,000 white women being raped by black men every year. They had nothing to say about 20% unemployment rates. They were silent when the illegitimacy rate reached 40%. Of all the things they chose to get angry over, it was a tiny spending bill trying to help out a few poor people, ie, trying to make America as civilized and compassionate as the entire rest of the developed world, all of whom have public health care for all. For this, people are willing to go to war to prevent.
They had no objections to the destruction of the family. Nothing to say on crime. No objections to the death of the white race all across the world, and the last blue-eyed children being born into this world surrounded by people who hate them, deprived of any future in a homeland that has a past stretching back tens of thousands of years. Nothing to say on muslim immigration which promises to firebomb the Notre Dame cathedral and the Louvre just like they did the buddhas of bamiyan in France. No objection to the ending of free speech or the right to bear arms. Entirely content with the ten million dollar bonuses awarded to CEO's who drove their companies into bankruptcy and required taxpayer bailouts. These catatonic, comatose republicans sleep walked through atrocity after atrocity, horror after horror, without uttering a mere peep of protest. Things worth fighting over, things worth dying over, like our beautiful brilliant white children having a future in this universe, were all discarded like empty gum wrappers. BUT OH NO, NOT THIS HEALTH CARE BILL -- THIS IS TOO FAR! 800 billion dollars spent on, gasp, UNINSURED POOR PEOPLE! This, and nothing else, has roused the anger of the masses? Are you kidding me? If people had simply walked like cattle to their doom their whole lives, never objecting to anything, at least I could entertain myself with the belief that the human mind is simply incapable of rousing itself to action. But no, it's even worse. It's not that people couldn't get angry, couldn't go to war, couldn't secede. It's just that they couldn't do it over ANYTHING IMPORTANT. It had to be over helping save poor people and children's lives. NOTHING ELSE IS WORTH FIGHTING OVER EXCEPT DEPRIVING CHILDREN OF HEALTH CARE. THAT'S THE ONLY REPUBLICAN CAUSE THAT PUTS THE FIRE IN THEIR BELLIES. DEATH TO THE POOR. DEATH TO CHILDREN! HURRAH! HURRAH! HURRAH!
American conservatives disgust me. At least liberals have good motives. No possible construction can be given that would say the same of republicans. They are ugly, heartless, spineless trash.
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