A.J. DiCintio
The real (audaciously arrogant) mob
By A.J. DiCintio
Ever since the "great" Karl Marx and Company proclaimed their superiority over all other social/political/economic thinkers because they claimed to have discovered the purely material principles that underlie "scientific" socialism, one of the defining characteristics of the political left has been the kind of ridiculous, pretentious pride being displayed in the healthcare debate by Democrats.
Think about it. With respect to reforming an industry that consumes 16% of our economy and literally deals with issues of life and death, Democrats could have proposed a reasonable approach that would have enjoyed wide public support.
For example, they could have fashioned a proposal that begins by implementing the goal put forth by Paul O'Neill (NY Times, July, 2009), specifically, to recover "roughly $1 trillion" of annual health care "waste" with relatively little cost and not a single new medication or technology.
Now, even if Mr. O'Neill's estimate is off by 50%, we're talking about a huge amount of money.
So, what are the reforms that the former Secretary of the Treasury asserts "doctors and administrators already know how to do"?
Eliminate the millions of infections acquired at hospitals every year.
Eliminate the annual toll of 300 million medication errors.
Eliminate pneumonia caused by ventilators.
Eliminate falls that injure hospital patients.
In addition to supporting that kind of reform, a wide majority of Americans (63% according to Pew) support tort reform (actually, "lawyer-care reform") and anti-trust reform, which, taken together, will reduce the cost of doctors' overhead, health insurance premiums, and drug costs.
And what American who doesn't benefit from corruption in the healthcare system wouldn't support a real plan to conduct a war on waste and fraud in Medicare?
(Where might the first shot of such a campaign be fired? How about McAllen, Texas, where, according to Atul Gawande (New Yorker), "In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee . . . almost twice the national average.")
Yes, if Democrats would get to work implementing the reforms just mentioned, they could take credit for saving the American public an enormous amount of pain and suffering — physical, mental, and financial.
Moreover, having thereby earned the public's trust, they could continue to serve the nation by empowering the states to innovate regarding a host of other health care issues, including providing help to those who are uninsured through no fault of their own.
Problem is, the notion of Democratic politicians working to offer the American people an incremental, practicable, results oriented, creative, market based regimen for healthcare reform exists only in the conditional if's, would's, and could's that remind us of the Yiddish proverb, "If my grandmother would have had testicles, she'd have been my grandfather!"
Why that conclusion?
The answer is simple:
"Intellectually superior" leftists think only in terms of grand schemes that they (who else?) enact, administrate, and adjudicate at the level of government most remote from the ignorant, crude, callous "mob" the Constitution celebrates as "the people."
And it is precisely that contemptible arrogance that explains the following behaviors regarding what is almost certain to become The Democratic Healthcare Reform Debacle:
. . . Barack Obama rejected taking time to listen to the people in favor of directing medical and social geniuses Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Harry Reid, Christopher Dodd, Max Baucus, and the rest of congressional Democrats (job approval 24%) to completely restructure the nation's healthcare system in two months.
. . . Barack Obama reacted to opponents of his healthcare madness by posting the following appeal on the White House website:
If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.
In a very convenient omission, the appeal fails to mention that if the "fishy" submission contains the name of the commentator, protestor, etc., Obama's White House could be guilty of "maintaining" a "record" on a U.S. citizen in violation of The Privacy Act of 1974. But then, the president might be spending so many hours burnishing his reputation as a "constitutional scholar" that he doesn't have time to concern himself with mere statute law.
. . . Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (USA Today) despicably employed Saul Alinsky's "rule" that urges leftist "angels" to "target, freeze, personalize, and polarize" society's "devils" when they characterized citizens who protest Obamacare at town hall meetings as moral/intellectual marshmallows whom "swastika" adorned crazies recruited to be part of an "ugly campaign" that trades in "un-American" tactics.
. . . The DNC' s Brad Woodhouse dutifully echoed Democrats in the White House and Congress when he spoke of town hall meetings besieged by "angry mobs of rabid right-wing extremists."
. . . The NY Times' Charles M. Blow complained that the meetings have been "hijacked by hooligans" whose "belligerence" marks them as "intellectually bankrupt."
. . . The NY Times' Gail Collins mocked Americans who are frightened and angered by Obamacare as "loud and unlovable hecklers" who make "members of Congress look . . . sympathetic."
Finally, and topping off this mile-high pile of garbage being spewed by America's insufferable, self-proclaimed intellectual elite, there is the fact that from Obama on down, Democrats are asking the American people to believe that without any reductions in medical services, they will pay the $1.5 trillion cost of their all-at-once "reform" exclusively through taxing the rich.
That lie — lied, by the way, in the midst of a nearly two trillion dollar annual deficit three-quarters of which Obama and Friends have created and have promised to reduce substantially without taxing the middle class — brings us to this final observation:
Only an incredibly audacious, frighteningly dangerous, stunningly stupid, perfectly obnoxious arrogance can possibly be the force impelling Democrats to denounce the more than half of the population who oppose Obamacare — including a great number of senior citizens — as a "mob" enamored of Nazi Fascism.
But not to worry; for Americans know that in addition to denoting a "disorderly crowd," the word mob denotes "an affiliation of gangsters." That piece of knowledge, coupled with their understanding of "The Spirit of '76," means they can never be fooled about who the mobsters really are.
© A.J. DiCintio
August 15, 2009
Ever since the "great" Karl Marx and Company proclaimed their superiority over all other social/political/economic thinkers because they claimed to have discovered the purely material principles that underlie "scientific" socialism, one of the defining characteristics of the political left has been the kind of ridiculous, pretentious pride being displayed in the healthcare debate by Democrats.
Think about it. With respect to reforming an industry that consumes 16% of our economy and literally deals with issues of life and death, Democrats could have proposed a reasonable approach that would have enjoyed wide public support.
For example, they could have fashioned a proposal that begins by implementing the goal put forth by Paul O'Neill (NY Times, July, 2009), specifically, to recover "roughly $1 trillion" of annual health care "waste" with relatively little cost and not a single new medication or technology.
Now, even if Mr. O'Neill's estimate is off by 50%, we're talking about a huge amount of money.
So, what are the reforms that the former Secretary of the Treasury asserts "doctors and administrators already know how to do"?
Eliminate the millions of infections acquired at hospitals every year.
Eliminate the annual toll of 300 million medication errors.
Eliminate pneumonia caused by ventilators.
Eliminate falls that injure hospital patients.
In addition to supporting that kind of reform, a wide majority of Americans (63% according to Pew) support tort reform (actually, "lawyer-care reform") and anti-trust reform, which, taken together, will reduce the cost of doctors' overhead, health insurance premiums, and drug costs.
And what American who doesn't benefit from corruption in the healthcare system wouldn't support a real plan to conduct a war on waste and fraud in Medicare?
(Where might the first shot of such a campaign be fired? How about McAllen, Texas, where, according to Atul Gawande (New Yorker), "In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee . . . almost twice the national average.")
Yes, if Democrats would get to work implementing the reforms just mentioned, they could take credit for saving the American public an enormous amount of pain and suffering — physical, mental, and financial.
Moreover, having thereby earned the public's trust, they could continue to serve the nation by empowering the states to innovate regarding a host of other health care issues, including providing help to those who are uninsured through no fault of their own.
Problem is, the notion of Democratic politicians working to offer the American people an incremental, practicable, results oriented, creative, market based regimen for healthcare reform exists only in the conditional if's, would's, and could's that remind us of the Yiddish proverb, "If my grandmother would have had testicles, she'd have been my grandfather!"
Why that conclusion?
The answer is simple:
"Intellectually superior" leftists think only in terms of grand schemes that they (who else?) enact, administrate, and adjudicate at the level of government most remote from the ignorant, crude, callous "mob" the Constitution celebrates as "the people."
And it is precisely that contemptible arrogance that explains the following behaviors regarding what is almost certain to become The Democratic Healthcare Reform Debacle:
. . . Barack Obama rejected taking time to listen to the people in favor of directing medical and social geniuses Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Harry Reid, Christopher Dodd, Max Baucus, and the rest of congressional Democrats (job approval 24%) to completely restructure the nation's healthcare system in two months.
. . . Barack Obama reacted to opponents of his healthcare madness by posting the following appeal on the White House website:
If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.
In a very convenient omission, the appeal fails to mention that if the "fishy" submission contains the name of the commentator, protestor, etc., Obama's White House could be guilty of "maintaining" a "record" on a U.S. citizen in violation of The Privacy Act of 1974. But then, the president might be spending so many hours burnishing his reputation as a "constitutional scholar" that he doesn't have time to concern himself with mere statute law.
. . . Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (USA Today) despicably employed Saul Alinsky's "rule" that urges leftist "angels" to "target, freeze, personalize, and polarize" society's "devils" when they characterized citizens who protest Obamacare at town hall meetings as moral/intellectual marshmallows whom "swastika" adorned crazies recruited to be part of an "ugly campaign" that trades in "un-American" tactics.
. . . The DNC' s Brad Woodhouse dutifully echoed Democrats in the White House and Congress when he spoke of town hall meetings besieged by "angry mobs of rabid right-wing extremists."
. . . The NY Times' Charles M. Blow complained that the meetings have been "hijacked by hooligans" whose "belligerence" marks them as "intellectually bankrupt."
. . . The NY Times' Gail Collins mocked Americans who are frightened and angered by Obamacare as "loud and unlovable hecklers" who make "members of Congress look . . . sympathetic."
Finally, and topping off this mile-high pile of garbage being spewed by America's insufferable, self-proclaimed intellectual elite, there is the fact that from Obama on down, Democrats are asking the American people to believe that without any reductions in medical services, they will pay the $1.5 trillion cost of their all-at-once "reform" exclusively through taxing the rich.
That lie — lied, by the way, in the midst of a nearly two trillion dollar annual deficit three-quarters of which Obama and Friends have created and have promised to reduce substantially without taxing the middle class — brings us to this final observation:
Only an incredibly audacious, frighteningly dangerous, stunningly stupid, perfectly obnoxious arrogance can possibly be the force impelling Democrats to denounce the more than half of the population who oppose Obamacare — including a great number of senior citizens — as a "mob" enamored of Nazi Fascism.
But not to worry; for Americans know that in addition to denoting a "disorderly crowd," the word mob denotes "an affiliation of gangsters." That piece of knowledge, coupled with their understanding of "The Spirit of '76," means they can never be fooled about who the mobsters really are.
© A.J. DiCintio
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