Is the goal of health care reform merely to save lives? If so, there are much better ways to do it than universal health insurance, as indicted by Daniel Akst in The Atlantic:
A new Harvard study estimates that lack of health insurance kills about 45,000 Americans annually, which is 2.5 times as many as the previous best estimate commonly cited in the health care debate. This is a big difference (27,000 additional lives). But it still pales in comparison with the more than one million Americans who die annually by their own hands--which they use to light cigarettes, lift forks and convey too many alcoholic beverages to their lips.
I recently read George Orwell's concept of doublethink and was impressed with how well he foresaw the way we would become:
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
Beautifully terrifying given its prevalence in these times. Here's a recent example: Selective Deficit Disorder. Now let's get it straight. Are large budget deficits terrible or not? The answer is that it depends:
Where, for instance, were the conservative protest marchers when President George W. Bush vastly expanded the deficit with his massive tax cuts for the wealthy? Where was Sen. Lincoln’s concern for “deficit neutrality” when she voted to give $700 billion to the thieves on Wall Street? Where was Obama’s “dime standard” when he proposed a budget that spends far more on maintaining bloated Pentagon budgets than on any universal health care proposal being considered in Congress? Where were demands for “fiscal sanity” by Brooks and other right-wing pundits when they cheered on the budget-busting war in Iraq? Where were the calls from these supposed “deficit hawks” to raise taxes when they backed all this profligate spending? And where were the journalists asking such painfully simple questions? They were nowhere to be seen or heard, because those plagued by Selective Deficit Disorder (as the name suggests) are only selectively worried about deficits.
Two weeks ago I briefly pointed out that Janet Napolitano, Secretary for Homeland Security, said that she wanted to reduce the level of fear in this country through improving preparedness for a terrorist attack. Now Homeland Security is seeking to do away with any pretense that we will ever be safe. Their latest proposal is to improve the "public credibility" of the system by"simplifying" the color scheme. If the recommendations are adopted, the new color scheme would consist only of yellow, orange, and red. Or, as Wendy McElroy put it, "the new levels are 1. Be Afraid, 2. Be Very Afraid, 3. Panic!"
While I'm heartened that they at least admit that it's "institutionally difficult" to lower the threat level, I still don't believe that the color scheme is an ideal solution. Keeping one's citizens in a constant state of fear that they will be attacked is, I believe, one way for the government to keep the public's attention diverted from the causes of terrorist attacks-- namely, our governments policies. If we were to stop killing innocent civilians around the world, we may just find that people around the world no longer wish to kill us in retaliation.
It is refreshing to hear someone from time to time call something by what it actually is. Frank Schaeffer is a former evangelical christian whose father was one of the most influential in the budding fundamentalist movement back int he Sixties and Seventies. Schaeffer recounts his life in the memoir Crazy For God.
This is a man was was there, involved, part of it. Doubtless many who did not snap out of it along the way think he's a traitor, that he's been possessed by Satan, that he is evil. Yet that still doesn't answer the criticisms he brings to the subject.
A recent poll in New Jersey has revealed that one in three right wing voters believe Obama is the Anti-Christ. I will let the video take it from there.
LaLa Land. That's about as accurate as one can be. What the fundamentalist movement has created of itself is a situation in which absolutely nothing can penetrate the wall of doublespeak and obfuscation they have built around themselves. They are a community living within a tautology, and they cannot allow themselves to see it.
I agree with Schaeffer that it is time to encircle them and move on. But this is a democracy, wherein all voices have at least a theoretical right to be heard. We do not have a pat, rigorous response politically to the introduction of absurdisms into the public discourse. We waffle, we try to be polite (which they do not) we try to be reasonable (which they take advantage of and disrespect) we try to, ironically, turn the other cheek in the face of their fallacious onslaught of nonsense.
As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar....and sometimes an idiot is just an idiot.
Sometimes, the hypocrisy is so delicious, I can't stand it. Texas Representative Kevin Brady is apparently upset that the D.C. metro subway system did not provide added services to accommodate the Tea-party protests last weekend. From the Wall Street Journal:
“These individuals came all the way from Southeast Texas to protest the excessive spending and growing government intrusion by the 111th Congress and the new Obama administration,” Brady wrote. “These participants, whose tax dollars were used to create and maintain this public transit system, were frustrated and disappointed that our nation’s capital did not make a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit for them.”
He added that an 80 year old woman and several veterans in wheelchairs were forced to pay for cabs. These private sector cabs (which were much more expensive and much less convenient) took them to their protest against government-provided services, when they would have preferred to ride on a taxpayer-funded socialist subway. No word yet on whether any heads exploded due to massive internal contradictions.
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