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Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the sphere….The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble
This is The “Stop Look and Listen” Edition
- KRUGMAN GETS A DOSE OF REALITY ON HEALTHCARE: >I wonder if it’ll take. (Vid)
- REMOVING ALL DOUBT: Over at The Corner, Andy McCarthy looks at a piece by Deb Burlingame. Both of them examine [2]… somewhat disbelievingly, the recent withdrawal of security measures surrounding Shoe Bomber Richard Reid, by the Obama Justice Dept. In another article [3], Andy looks at another situation with Holder and Obama, this time involving the intimidation case against the Black Panthers. As if we needed any further proof that this administration is at least misguided, we keep seeing more. But who, I wonder, is paying attention? And why are Deb and Andy the only people I’ve head about the Reid thing from?
- MORE BAD NEWS FOR THE LEFT: Byron York at his new perch at the Washington Examiner points up the latest polling trends… [4] and says it’s not good new for Obama, or for the Democrat Congress. Even MSNBC says Obama’s losing ground, [5]particularly on the health care issue. Good Lord… if you can get even MSNBC to admit it… Gallup says Obama’s reached a new low… [6] Rasmussen says Obama approval’s sliding past 48% [7]… VDH remarks yesterday at The Corner [8]that:
[9]Victor Davis Hanson
Team Obama knows that just as the Great Depression and FDR’s eloquence led to a radically new statism, so too the late 2008 meltdown and Obama’s charisma have given the Left an historic chance to enact a doctrinaire liberal agenda that otherwise polls poorly.The key will be to rush through as much as possible before last year’s panic and Bush become ancient history — and Obama’s own soaring rhetoric becomes trite and boilerplate.
The problem for Obama at this stage… (And with him the rest of the left) is that not only has the current set of problems become decidedly his own… meaning he can no longer blame Bush for them… but his boilerplate rhetoric has become obviously so… and that boilerplate is gathering substantial amounts of rust, as his promises all backfire on him, one by one, and people who suffer under programs like the one he’s pushing, report in [10] such as Theodore Dalrymple. Hanson concludes:
Unpopular presidents cannot enact unpopular legislation, no matter how once popular they were, no matter how much they blame their predecessors and Wall Street greed.
Obama is about one or two more gaffes away from a stampeding herd of House Democrats.Just so. And I submit that the House Dems are a trailing indicator, here… that they’d not be nervous in the House if they didn’t understand that they are already in serious trouble on all this, and that the former Obama supporters are already looking for the exit. As such, I regard the ‘great news’ that Waxman managed to get a delay on the health care vote until after the recess, for example… to be great news for America… once the house members take recess, get back to their districts and see what a firestorm of opposition to Obamacare there is, there’s a very small chance indeed of it’s passage as currently pushed by the White House.
- SOCIALISM IN THE AGE OF COMMUNICATION: You know, in reading Theodore Dalrymple’s notes, linked again here, [11] and in watching the reaction to Obama and company of late, one gets the decided impression it would be all so much easier on the socialists among us to gain their socialist wet dreams, if we didn’t have a nearly universal ability to exchange information on an almost instantaneous basis. The people exchanging ideas and learning from each other’s mistakes is why most socialist regimes so solidly isolate themsleves. Allowing your subjcts to learn the ideas you’re pushing have fatal flaws from the standpoint of the subjects, is not a way to get such ideas passed into the law of the land. All this is a tangent of course, from his discussion on the repercussions of ‘healthcare being a right” which of course is a more foundational question. He’s arguing principle, while I’m arguing consequences. But I have to tell you the line drawn between those two angles gets very thin indeed, when Dalrymple points out:
When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?”When I then ask my interlocutor whether he can think of any reason why people should not be left to die in the street, other than that they have a right to health care, he is generally reduced to silence. He cannot think of one.
[12]Theodore Dalrymple
Moreover, the right to grant is also the right to deny. And in times of economic stringency, when the first call on public expenditure is the payment of the salaries and pensions of health-care staff, we can rely with absolute confidence on the capacity of government sophists to find good reasons for doing bad things.
The question of health care is not one of rights but of how best in practice to organize it. America is certainly not a perfect model in this regard. But neither is Britain, where a universal right to health care has been recognized longest in the Western world.
Not coincidentally, the U.K. is by far the most unpleasant country in which to be ill in the Western world. Even Greeks living in Britain return home for medical treatment if they are physically able to do so.
The government-run health-care system—which in the U.K. is believed to be the necessary institutional corollary to an inalienable right to health care—has pauperized the entire population. This is not to say that in every last case the treatment is bad: A pauper may be well or badly treated, according to the inclination, temperament and abilities of those providing the treatment. But a pauper must accept what he is given.
Amazing comments… particularly when you keep in mind that in real life the man is an MD. To my point, then, measure your own reaction to these thoughts from Dalrymple, and multiply them by a few hundred million times. Think that’s not going to cause some serious second thoughts against the socialist idea of ‘healthcare is a right”? Can socialism, of whatever strain, be established in a country that has free and open communications? Hmmm. Maybe that’s why Socialists are also prone to wanting the government to run the news [13].
- THE SUBSTANTIAL PENALTY FOR LATE WITHDRAWAL: Reynolds notes Tracy Quan [14], who in turn questions the recent chatter about how ‘pulling out’ works. I have to say, I have my doubts as well. And it’s not like pregnancy is the only issue. And of course it’s all the guy’s fault if she gets preggers, anyway, right? (Do you know how often I’ve heard that line over the years? Mostly, from women I’d not have been caught dead with, of course. )
- OH, FOR PITY’S SAKE: Don’t these morons [15]remember Seamus Finnagan saying: “Eye of rabbit, harp sting hum, turn this water into rum…”…(boom) ? And that was in the very first book/movie! Common, guys… I mean, it’s not like this is a new element. Oh… and since they waited for the movie to show up, it’s clear they’ve not actually read the book, right? So much for the vaunted literary gravitas of the New York Times. Let them drink their weak tea, all right?
- After all….. Obama had a beer [16]… even if it was a weak one.